threshold

Today I offer a bilingual nýyrði: skemmtunarþröskuldur. In English this should be the entertainment threshold. This may not be a phrase you are familiar with, but I wager as you will recognize the concept once it is explained. This is best accomplished with the use of examples.

To wit: Some people naturally possess a low entertainment threshold. You know them. They are lucky; they laugh easily and at things that may, arguably, not actually be that funny. They need little to have a good time. The rest of us may have some success lowering our own, sometimes inconveniently high entertainment threshold through sheer good will, the keeping of very late hours, or the application of alcohol. Have you never tried to retell a joke or anecdote that really had been terribly funny in the wee hours of the night before, only to have it ring utterly hollow even in your own ears? You have, you know you have, and so then you have experienced the vaguaries of the shifting skemmtunarþröskuldur.

However, staying up late does not ensure a lágur skemmtunarþröskuldur. Indeed, even when both long hours and liberal libations have dropped the entertainment threshold to sub-basement levels, frequently there is a point past which it starts, inexorably, to rise again. One may not notice it at first. One may, in fact, not notice it before one feels oneself knock uncomfortably against it or even later. It is past this point that one will cease having fun.

Experience has shown that it pays to cultivate the ability to detect the first brush against the rising skemmtunarþröskuldur. This allows one to take the decision to go home immediately. Some people are better at this than others. There is probably a large environmental component in the development of this aptitude. I say this recalling the chaos in Reykjavík nightlife that followed the lifting of the 3-o'clock closing rule. Hordes of merrymakers, no longer forced from the bars at three a.m. að gömlum sið, sat still trying to make merry as late as six or seven. But alas, they had long since crossed, without feeling it, back over their own skemmtunarþröskuldar, and they sat miserable and painfully drunk in the morning light, wholly unable to skemmta sér, and seemingly unable to form (independently and without outside stimulus) the idea of going home already.

This was now several years ago, and I believe I have seen improvement in the mean ability of the average Reykvíkingur to call it a night before altogether losing the ability to enjoy oneself, but it has been slow going.