Swedish 101

NINAD JOG

January 1997

Here's a brief lesson in Swedish, a language in which Java is pronounced Yhava, where the entrance to a car park is called Infart and the exit is called Utfart.

Many languages have words whose meanings in other languages are absolutely hilarious or downright offensive or plain different, and a recent stay in Sweden acquainted me with several such Swedish words and phrases.

As if infart and utfart were not enough, Maximum Speed is called Top Fart. The word for vacation is semester, and a dinner jacket is called smoking. That could be one reason why there don't seem to be any non-smoking restaurants in the Swedish capital Stockholm.

Shopping for shampoo in a suburban Stockholm store, I chanced upon a bottle that advertised its contents in bold letters as BAD SKUM. It sent me into paroxysms of raucous laughter, much to the alarm of a couple of dear old ladies shopping nearby. Face it: you would too. I later learnt that Bad Skum (pronounced Bahd Skoom) meant Bath Foam or liquid soap.

A bookstore yielded another linguistic gem: the Swedish title of author-in-hiding Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh translates to Moors Sista Suck.

When someone greets you with the Swedish equivalent of How's It Goin'?, a common response is Bra!, which means good. If you're feeling real good, you say jättebra, which is Giant Bra, or very good. The goodbye greeting is Hej då, pronounced Hey Dough. Now that I'm back from Sweden I use the expression to greet any piece of dough: upon getting my paycheck I go, Hej då!

As in Britain, the preferred Swedish morning greeting is Good Morning rather than the informal Hi of America. Written God Morgon, it is pronounced Goo Moron. Calling people morons to their faces the first thing in the morning can be a supreme source of sophomoric satisfaction.

Swedish is notorious for concatenating compound nouns into tongue twisters of formidable length, and the entry for the longest word in the Guinness Book is allegedly one such word. Smaller examples abound: boxershorts and restaurangparkering (parking for restaurant patrons).

A Swedish colleague mentioned a compound word that is strange even by Swedish standards. There's a town in Sweden named Rå (å is pronounced aow), through which flows a river named Å, in which lives a species of fish named ål. Fish caught in the part of the river flowing through that town are called Rååål, pronounced raw-aow-aowl, stressing each syllable. (How appetizing does this sound: Hello there. I just had some rååål for dinner.)

Fortunately the hilarity is not all one-sided. Swedes point out that Skor, a brand of chocolates sold in the U.S. means shoes in Swedish. "Americans eat shoes!" was their excited refrain.

It was Swedish colleagues who first pointed out the signs saying Slut on juice dispensers in restaurants. "Press it and see what happens", was the risqué exhortation. I did, and in addition to getting a glass of juice learnt that slut is the Swedish word for operate or finish.

While hyphenated family names are common in many cultures, Swedes go a step further. They even have hyphenated first names such as Ann-Sophie and Karl-Axel Axelsson. More often than not, both first and last names are hyphenated - as in Ann-Sophie Eriksson-Lindgren and Anna-Stinna Glitter-Johansson. (And here I'm violating an unwritten precept that people with last names such as Jog shouldn't make fun of Glitters and Car Axels.)

Having added the three characters å, ä and ö to the script, which foreigners have trouble pronouncing, Swedes have replaced most W's with V's, gotten rid of Q's except in names such as Lundqvist, and supplanted unpopular C’s with massive doses of K's. Thus Cuba is written Kuba, and China is written and pronounced Kina. Kinda kute, kinda kool.

Part of my daily commute to work involved taking a bus headed for Hagalund after passing train stations with interesting names. One snowy October morning I reflected about how my journey had brought me from Maryland to Hagalund via Stadshagen and Hagsätra, and I wondered where it would take me next. All those destinations have unprintable meanings in Hindi and that reality was sobering.

As my stay in Sweden drew to a close, I launched a frantic search for Bad Skum in the stores. Apparently word had gotten around that evil foreigners were mocking the product and the skum had been cleaned off the shelves. Swedish colleagues at work anxiously tracked my progress: "Did you find any Bad Skum over the weekend?" became the preferred Monday morning query in favor of the more pedestrian "How was your weekend?"

Despite my best efforts I was not able to get hold of a bottle, so I settled for the next best alternative and bought a bottle of barberskum. To this day it produces a smooth shave.