--- title: "Noksan" description: "A quatrain about not insisting on a hundred, built on three Turkish words that sound almost identical, and attributed to a man who could not have written it." date: 2026-09-20 category: Arts readingTime: "4 min read" --- There is a quatrain that circulates in Turkish, usually under Mevlana's name, which I have seen shared perhaps forty times and never once with a source. Yüzde ısrar etme, doksan da olur,\ İnsan dediğinde noksanda olur,\ Sakın büyüklenme, elde neler var,\ Bir ben varım deme, yoksan da olur,\ Hatasız dost arayan, dosttan da olur. Don't insist on 100%, 90% is also fine,\ To be human means to have flaws.\ Never be arrogant, look at what you have,\ Don't say "Only I exist", it's fine if you are not there.\ He who seeks a flawless friend remains friendless. It makes three moves, and they are not one move repeated. The first is humility. A person can always be lacking, and a hundred percent is not a standard so much as a misunderstanding of what people are. Ninety is not a concession. It is the accurate number. The second is a test of pride. Do not let your own existence or capability swell into importance, because whatever you are holding up carries on perfectly well after you put it down. That is not an insult. It is only true. The third is about friendship, and it is the one that stings, because it converts the other two from advice into consequence. Anyone who goes looking for a flawless person ends up alone. The search has no possible object, and conducting it costs you the people who were already there. --- The word doing the work is *noksan*, and it arrives in Turkish from Arabic, from the root *n-q-ṣ*, which means to diminish, to fall short, to be less than the full amount. *Nuqṣān* is the deficiency itself, the missing portion. *Nâkıs* is the thing that has it. Turkish already had a word for this. *Eksik* is native, built from the same stem that gives *eksi*, minus, the sign for taking away. It means missing, lacking, short. In ordinary speech you would use *eksik* for almost everything: the change is short, a screw is missing, someone left early. So Turkish, [as it does with a great many things](/blog/words-between-languages), kept both, and over time they stopped being interchangeable. *Eksik* is arithmetic. Something is absent and could in principle be supplied. *Noksan* is closer to a condition than a quantity. It is what you say about a character, a piece of work, a person. You would not say a human being is *eksik*. It would sound like they had been assembled incorrectly and could be sent back. The line does not say humans *have* deficiency. It says that when you say the word human, you are already in deficiency. *Noksanda olur*: you find yourself in it, as a location. It is not a property of the thing. It is where the thing is standing. --- The poem's actual machinery is sound, not meaning. *Doksan*, ninety. *Noksan*, deficient. *Yoksan*, if you are not there. Three words that differ by almost nothing, arranged so that the argument arrives through the ear before it arrives through the head: the number, the lack, the absence. You hear the case being made before you follow it. There is a detail in the spelling that is easy to lose and worth keeping. Turkish writes *da* as a separate word when it means *also*, and joins it as *-da* when it marks location. So *doksan da olur* is ninety will do as well, and *yoksan da olur* is it holds even if you are absent. Both are the clitic, both stand apart. The second line does not: *noksanda* is joined, and joined means inside. Lines one and four say a thing is additionally true. Line two says where you are standing. One space, and the sentence changes from arithmetic to address. And there is a smaller trick underneath, which is *olur*. It is the most ordinary verb in the language: to be, to become, it'll do, fine, alright. In the first line it means *that will suffice*. In the second it means *one finds oneself in*. In the fourth, *things will be fine*. And then in the last line it turns, because *-dan olmak* means to be deprived of something, to lose it. *Dosttan da olur* is not "becomes a friend." It is "loses the friend as well." So the same four letters run through the verse meaning *suffices*, *resides in*, *is fine*, and finally *forfeits*. The poem never raises its voice. The verb quietly changes sides at the end and the person demanding perfection is standing there holding nothing. --- I have been on the wrong end of the last line more often than I would like to write down. The version of it I know best is not about friends. It is about work. There is a particular failure mode where you will not ship a thing because it is not yet the thing, and every week you can name precisely what is still wrong with it, and the naming feels like rigour. It is not rigour. Rigour has a stopping condition. This does not, because the standard moves with you. The thing gets better, the standard gets better, and the gap is preserved exactly. I have written about [the forty-eight hours of satisfaction](/blog/on-dissatisfaction) that follow finishing something, and the reason the window is that narrow is that the standard has already moved by the third day. Engineering culture is built almost entirely on the refusal of ninety. A hundred percent coverage. Zero downtime. Five nines, which is a way of saying a hundred while quietly admitting you cannot have it. None of these are wrong exactly; they are useful in the places where the cost of the missing ten is genuinely catastrophic, which is a much smaller set of places than the ones that claim it. Most of what any of us build is not that, and the hundred is being insisted on for a different reason, one that is easier to see in someone else than in yourself. The poem's diagnosis of that reason is in the third line, and it is not flattering. *Sakın büyüklenme, elde neler var.* Never be arrogant, look at what you have. The demand for the full hundred is not usually about quality. It is about not being caught being insufficient. --- Now the part I did not expect when I started writing this. The poem is almost certainly not Mevlana's. He wrote in Persian, and whatever else is true of translation, a verse whose entire engine is three Turkish words that happen to rhyme cannot be a translation of anything. The pun is not decoration on top of the argument. It *is* the argument. Strip it out and you have a sentiment; leave it in and you have a poem. Which means it was composed in Turkish, by someone, and that someone is not the man in Konya. I sat with this for a while because I had already written most of what is above, and the honest options were to cut the attribution, cut the poem, or say so. But the attribution is the best thing about it. Here is a verse instructing you not to insist on the full hundred, not to inflate what you are actually holding, not to say *I alone exist*, and it has spent years travelling under a name that is not its own, borrowed for exactly the reason the poem warns against, because a great name makes the claim heavier. The poem is in *noksan*. It is missing its author. It is standing in the deficiency it describes. And I notice that I do not think less of it. If anything the opposite, because the alternative would be a poem about accepting ninety that arrived with immaculate provenance, fully sourced, its author beyond dispute: a poem quietly contradicting itself in the footnotes. *Hatasız dost arayan, dosttan da olur.* He who seeks a flawless friend remains friendless. I think the same applies to the flawless poem, and I would rather keep this one, unsourced, ninety percent, than be the kind of reader who put it down over the last ten.