Swedish makes fucking reflexive

Tomas Zirn at Computer Sweden has a great quote from Morten Lund:

Jag gjorde ett försök med tidningar, men det fuckade upp sig

I gave newspapers a shot but it fucked itself up.

WTF?

Let The Right One In Official Red Band Trailer

Coming to the Ritz Bourse in November!

Glad Midsommar!

Hat tip: Peter Rost
I know I posted this before, but it's timely.

Ladies, hide your bicycles!

You might want to keep it inside.

A 36-year old man from Östersund has been accused of sexual molestation after he slit tires on women's bicycles and then ejaculated and soiled the seats. He "molested" one woman three times.

Östersund's district court is charging the man with sexual molestation because he chose bicycles that he saw women riding to vandalize. The crimes are therefore, according to the court, targeted at women and not just bicycles.

The man has been given a conditional sentence and ordered to pay fines as well as reimburse the women for the damage to their bicycles.

The lonliness of the long-tail consumer

I have no one to discuss Häxdansen with.

Sometimes I don't get Swedes

Even for me, a guy descended from them, who has lived among them, learned their language, made friends with some of them, and immersed myself in their culture, Swedes can be confounding.
Among some things I will never understand is why they can't speak English. I've already talked about how they can't pronounce viking and video correctly even though THEY ARE PRONOUNCED WITH A V IN SWEDISH!
Now add the fact that they insist on calling polar bears 'icebears'. What is up with that? I may never know.

Why is this so hard?

I'm always surprised when people think that Yeungling beer is Chinese. But I never expected it from a Swede. Still, Lennart at Det Progressiva USA, makes this mistake.

Det finns ingen chans på denna jorden att Pennsylvanias mest berömda öl kan vara kinesiskt, arbetarna där är alldeles för invandrarfientliga för att dricka kinesiskt öl, än mindre för att rösta på Barack Obama, så jag googlade och det visar sig att namnet ursprungligen är tyskt och detsamma som det svenska yngling!

There's no way in the world that Pennsylvania's most famous beer is Chinese, workers there are too xenophobic to drink Chinese beer, not to mention vote for Barack Obama, so I googled it and the name turns out to be of German origin and cognate with the Swedish word yngling!

C'mon, the word is freaking so obviously germanic!
Also, Lennart needs to visit PA and talk to some real "arbetar" here. I can hook him up with my brothers who all seem to be leaning toward Obama.

Attentat--Jag hade en gång en båt

Vallhalavägen

Swedish TV sucks

Swedish game show host pukes on tv and blames it on the fact she is menstruating.

Thank you Boredoom

Last night Boredoom and I watched Gitarrmongot. I laughed AND cried!

Hmmm...

In southern New Jersey there is a museum of a colonial era Swedish settlement. They claim Swedes are responsible for South Jersey dialect features.

The fort, a threat to Dutch shipping interests in New York, did not last long, but the settlements and the Scandinavian influence has endured over the years. Today, linguists theorize that certain speech patterns in Southern New Jersey, which differ from the rest of the State, are traceable to the mixed and changing Swedish-English vocabulary.

Could be.

Why I'm sad I missed midsummer in Sweden

Hat tip: Peter Rost

Bob Hund--Skall du hänga med? Nä!!

Thanks to Mike Lupica at WFMU for making me think to look on youtube for Bob Hund.

Timbuktu--Fantasi

Swedish detective movies in NY

Hey, if you're in NY and want to see some Swedish movies based on the popular Kurt Wallander books by Henning Mankell, check out the Scandinavia House. They're showing three films over the next few weeks.

And, see this guy?

That's Lars Melin (aka Lasse), an official FOE.

Is Swedish the new Eskimo?

Via Language Log, there is this Tank McNamara strip.

WTF, "Reindeer are trying to break into my SAAB"? You call that a punch-line? What, no 'bikini team' reference? Couldn't figure out how to work a polar bear in there? Or a chef? I blame IKEA.

Speaking of printing offensive words

THe January 4-11, 2007 issue of the Nordstjernan (the weekly newspaper for Swedish-Americans) has an article on Marjaneh Bakhtiari, a young Swedish-Iranian author. Marjaneh has a book out called Kalla det vad fan du vill (Lit: 'Call it what the devil you want').

There are two funny things about the article. First, the headline is simply the title of the book, except rather than print fan they print 'f-n'. But in the body of the article and the caption to the photo of the author they print the full title without disguising the offensive word. I'm not sure what is going on with the editorial staff at Nordstjernan.

The other funny thing is that the article translates the title of the book as Call it Whatever You Want. They seem not to be alone since the Iranian news site I linked to earlier calls it Name it Whatever You Wish. I would've translated it as Call it Whatever the Hell You Want.

Well, the book sounds worthwhile:

It is the story of two Iranian and Swedish families. When the Iranian father comes to Europe, it seems strange to him that no one knows Ferdowsi there. But he never thinks that he himself does not know anything about the history and literature of Sweden. He just wants to prove that Iranians are different from Arabs. But no one can understand him. Then the family lives in the past.
The mother of the family is a physics researcher and she is not interested in history and the past. She wants to learn Swedish language and their custom. But she cannot find an opportunity to communicate naturally.
The Iranian family gets acquaintance with the Swedish family. The mother of the family looks at the people as the cultural subjects which can make her life more interesting.

The nature of fuck in Swedish

Axel Theorin writes to Mark Liberman about his post about my post about the Swedes use of English swear words:

Ed Keer's feeling on the subject obviously differs, but I would say that English swear words retain most of their feeling of taboo. Especially a word like fuck since swear words on the sexual theme are virtually nonexistent in "native" Swedish, except for expressions casting doubt on the virtue of a woman (I know only two which are felt as swear words: kuk - cock and fitta - cunt). Thus "fuck" is a very strong swear word in the Swedish context and is felt even stronger in (real life) English contexts were many Swedes will refrain from using it alltogether. Even though this in turn becomes unnatural (if the context is England, according to reports). On the other hand, the prolific use of "fuck" seems to have opened some doors and lately you will here, although infrequently, Swedes swear by the act of sexual intercourse using the native word "knulla"

Now, I'm not a native speaker and I haven't been to Sweden in a loooooong time. So I accept Axel's points. I think what is surprising to me is the use of fuck in a national newspaper or the title of a blocbuster film.

Dagens Nyheter has search capabilities back to 2002. A search for the following words resulted in some interesting distributions.
118 hits for "fuck"
35 hits for "kuk" (dick)
47 hits for "fitta" (cunt)
983 hits for "fan" (damn)
761 hits for jävla (damned)
So part of what I saw was simply the Swedes are more lax using obscenities in newspapers than Americans.

But I still get a sense that "fuck" is not considered as bad as "kuk" or "fitta". In terms of number of uses, "fuck" falls between the somewhat mild "jävla" at 761 hits and the more obscene "fitta" and "kuk" both at under 50 hits. Though there may be any number of reasons for the lower numbers of "kuk", "fitta", and "fuck"

Of course, Swedes are welcome to comment on my impressions.

Swedes haven't got the memo

Today's Rocky cartoon in Dagens Nyheter:

The little bird is saying, "Did you know that the eskimos have 2500 words for snow?"
Rocky replies, "How many words do they have for fuck...snow?"
Hope Geoff Pullum doesn't see this. Chances are good, since Language Log never posts Swedish cartoons.