Sex, Prostitutes in Stations, Fuck Village, Cunt Crackers and the Swedish Language

Ok, the title is quiet misleading as is the subject of this entry which is about some Swedish words that when literally translated to English would mean a lot different.

The first one of course is SEX. In Swedish, “sex” is the word for both the number 6 and the act itself. In 2003, a female bank employee sent an email with the subject: Yes! I have had sex today…on the job! The email unfortunately was sent to the wrong person and in a few hours, the poor woman’s email with her real name and contact number was circulating all over Sweden. The next day, the bank manager needed to issue an statement explaining that they have this promotional campaign in the bank where they give some kind of bonus to employees who manage to recruit at least six bank customers. The reaction of many Swedes was like, “Yeah, right!” but still the double meaning of that word was still able to save the face of the poor bank employee to some extent.

The next funny Swedish word is the word for the train terminal, which is “slutstation.” Literally it means “end station”. In this case, if you write “slutstation” like “slut station”, then you just committed the same mistake of Smek This! in his post, which we had fun exchanging comments on. If you look at the top hit in the google result of “slut station”, you’ll understand why. You see, Swedish is quite a complicated language with  the blank character between two words capable of drastically changing their meanings, at least when read as English.
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There’s a small village close to Uppsala, a bit north of Stockholm that’s called Fjuckby. Last year, 15 of its around 50 inhabitants submitted a petition to the local government to change the name to Fjukeby. According to the petitioners, this new spelling will at least remove the ridicule and embarrassment they feel whenever they write down their address when they send letters abroad. Besides it was also the old name of the said village. However the Institute of Language and Heritage in Uppsala rejected the petition.

Even the English language has so much nuance that some words could still carry different meaning among native English speakers. As pointed out by Chris in Oxford in a comment he left in this post, it can really be funny when it comes to usage of some English words. As an american, he still chuckles whenever one of his British friends say, “I’m going for a fag…”

Much worse when you are a non-native English speaker trying to convey something harmless but can really be wildly interpreted as was the case of RennyBA in the earlier days when he met his american wife when he told her over the phone, “I have to let you go ’coz someone is coming in my office!” (RennyBA told this story in his comment in my previous post on Gang Bang.)

Finally there’s this brand of biscuit back home called “Fita crackers”. I brought one box of this from my last trip two years ago and left it in the common kitchen for everyone at my workplace. Amazingly, no one dared open the box. They were suspicious about the contents of course, as the slang for the female genitalia in Swedish closely resembles the spelling of Fita.