In Search of Ugyessness

There is a great little Hungarian word for which there is no satisfactory equivalent in Engligh. It is ‘Ugyes’ (pronounce that Ooojesh). It is commonly used to tell someone they did something well – ugyes vagy! – You are ugyes! But ‘Well done!’ it isn’t, as ugyes is an adjective. It conveys strength, determination, enthusiasm, cleverness, deftness, and more wrapped into one little positive word. And its not any of these individually, so ugyes vagy – translates as something ‘strong you are’ gives a flavour but doesn’t quite work. But you do end up sounding like Yoda (btw: so Yoda ends up selling mobile phones on British TV? I guess the darkside is the stronger in the final analysis).

And actually, yeah, maybe its best to understand ugyes as something like The Force. So Ugyes is best translated as ‘the force is strong with you’. That would probably do it. The pursuit of Ugyessness is a noble one, maybe we should all strive to be knights of Ugy.

p.s. Ugyetlen – liteally ‘without ugy’ by the way means ‘clumsy’