#19: Batavegur

Whenever something bad happens, whether it's an illness or a natural disaster or any other kind of crisis, we always hope for a speedy recovery. But the unfortunate truth is that sometimes recovery takes a while, because most things just can't be fixed with the flip of a switch or the push of a button. Instead, recovery is usually a slow and continuous process, which is exactly what is reflected in the Icelandic word batavegur.

Batavegur literally means "recovery road" (from bati, recovery, and vegur, road) and is most frequently encountered in the phrase á batavegi, or "on the road to recovery." It's something we say in English too, although we need a few more words to do so. Most often, it's used in reference to people who are ill, but it can also be used to describe other types of recovery. For instance, I recently encountered the phrase batavegur framsóknarmanns, or "a road to recovery for the Progressives," a political party in Iceland that has apparently not done as well as it would have liked in recent elections. In this country, there are probably a lot of people looking for the batavegur repúblikana, although that's a long, bumpy road which might simply impassable at this point.

The thing I like about batavegur is that it's a word that implies a journey-- you can't just teleport from the start of the road to the end; you need to take the slow path ala Madame de Pompadour. And convalescence, whether it's from a sickness or a bad election or anything else, is always a journey that must be taken one step at a time.

WORD SUMMARY:

bataveg/ur, -ar (m): road to recovery

Posted in: Compound Words, Nouns