It was the Norwegian word of the year in 2004, and a concept which the people here hold extremely dear.
But even despite Britain's pukka heritage of foreign word-appropriation “dugnad” is not a term which will quickly earn a place in the Oxford English dictionary.
Such is the shame. If it were nestled there somewhere in between “duffer” and “dugout”, perhaps we wouldn’t have to exhaust quite so much newsprint or airtime trying to work out what The Big Society is all about. As the Tory Party Conference in Manchester rolls around, we could look forward to politicians taking to the stage saying, “this Big Society thing - it’s just a great big dugnad isn’t it,” then sitting back down again.
Instead we’ll have to listen to bogus anecdotes about a “good friend” who gives up her Saturdays to help parcel up the detritus of doomed Post Offices. Or a constituent who drives leopard-print shoes to needy conference speakers through his social entrepreneurial venture, Heels on Wheels.
There is a telling phrase on the Big Society Network website which reads: “We think that the best way to get people excited and involved in the Big Society is to help the countless amazing people and communities around the UK tell their own stories, rather than publicise it through a big marketing campaign.”
Why don’t you just come out and say it: “we can’t do a big marketing campaign because we don’t really understand what The Big Society is, and even if we did, our message would be about as straightforward as a Latin translation of a Brief History of Time.”
Norwegians, because of their love of dugnads on the other hand, would very quickly grasp the idea. Unfortunately “dugnad” is a concept equally hostile to elegant interpretation. As simply as possible, it is an event run by a self-organising group of citizens who give up their time to perform some kind of civic duty like cleaning up a nursery or pruning the hedges in a public park. Attendees drink litres of black coffee, eat dozens of crazy little pancakes and everyone gets to go home feeling good about themselves. Best of all, nobody need dip into that lovely big Norwegian budget surplus.
Attempting to introduce a great big dugnad like The Big Society, while also implementing swathes of savage public cuts, as the Tories appear to be doing, is head-kickingly cynical. Britons are rightly sceptical. But you do have to wonder whether the absence of a word like dugnad in our own rich lexicon, suggests we don’t have the type of society which requires one.
This is no criticism. Yes, dugnads are exceptionally common, well attended and motivated by an enviable collective sense of civic responsibility. But, in a deeply conformist country like Norway, they are also motivated by the social shame of not attending. And the slavishness to responsibility manifests itself in a connected lack of everyday courtesy.
People here are so attuned to what they should do, that they almost invariably miss what they could do to make life a tiny bit more bearable. Don’t, for example, ever expect to be thanked for stopping your car at the side of a narrow road for an oncoming car to pass. “It was your responsibility,” the driver might say, “why the hell should I say thank you?”
For sure, it would be nice to have a country where communities believed in themselves, and concepts like the Big Society were instinctively understood. But, it’s equally nice to live in a place where you can walk behind someone into a shopping centre and not expect to have the door swing back in your face.
So yes, while it’s true that “dugnad” does not exist in English, it is equally true that there is no one-word Norwegian translation of the word, “please”.
And, as far as I can see, there is no grand political idea to try to introduce one either.
