“TCHUSS” MEANS ‘BYE IN GERMAN

But not in Persian, where it means a particularly smelly kind of soundless phart (and thereby ensuing a lot of hilarity for Iranian students of the German). It is also used for certain  kinds of people who offer to do favours for others in a pathetic attempt to make themselves liked. We usually say to such a person: “Stop making a Tchuss out of yourself!”. (Yes, this is part of Persian Culture too. It’s not all about Shiraz and hafez and kebab and mullahs!)

As in this exchange:

Unidentified, anonymous person: 

-Is anybody going to the department tomorrow? I have about four thousand papers I need delivered.

The newcomer leaps up, as if stung from behind:

-Yes! Please let me take them! I am going! No- it is no problem, I’d love to carry your four thousand papers in the rain to the department, along with the other three hundred books I am carrying! there is nothing I’d like better! Please- I’ll kill myself if you don’t let me take your papers! No, I insist! I have absolutely got to deliver your papers!

Fast forward to the following day, and we see the newcomer, trudging from point X on Dalhousie Upper Campus to point Y in howling wind and freezing rain, dragging a Lancome totebag full of papers belonging to someone she has done one course with, and barely exchanged fifty words during it. And that someone is not even a professor, which would have fully justified the act of making a Tchuss for her. She is just an ordinary student like me.

Each time I do this kind of Tchuss-making I harangue myself, telling myself I am old enough to know better to put myself out doing this kind of thing, I have enough little daily stresses on my plate without adding others etc, etc. And yet, everytime there is an occasion for making a Tchuss, I leap at it, eager to prove my moral worth, my amiability or whatever. I don’t know what my problems is. I don’t have enough character to do a tchuss gracefully, and yet I still go on doing it.

Tags: favours, life, people, relationships