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Unfortunately for our game, it is also the German word for “mustâ€. Unfortunately, because the software that underpins Artwiculate picks up any uses of the Word of the Day on Twitter and assumes they were composed for the game. So today we were swamped with imperative German tweets. It got me wondering if there were other words that might cause a similar flood of Swedish tweets. A little research produced a small selection of possibilities. One of the most common words in Swedish is i meaning “inâ€, but the chances of Artwiculate giving us an English pronoun to play with are invisible. However, the game usually goes for less common English words. Words like bland, runt, slag, tog and lag. These are all among the 1000 most frequently used Swedish words, though, of course, they mean something different than in English. In English, food is bland when it has little flavour, but in Swedish bland translates “among†and is one of the 100 most common words in the written language. In English a runt is the smallest, weakest animal in any litter, and thus also a word to use to describe a person you think small or weak physically or mentally. Whilst the Swedish word runt translates “roundâ€. In English, slag is the waste product of a foundry, a mine or a volcano as well as being (in British slang) a coarse word for a woman and to slander someone. In Australian English (according to my dictionary) it also means to spit. In Swedish slag translates “punch†and also means a fight, a battle, a sort, a type and the stroke of a clock’s bell – among other things. Tog is an informal English word meaning to dress oneself in smart clothes. It is also the name of “a unit of thermal resistance used to measure the power of insulation of a fabric, garment or quilt etc.†But in Swedish tog is the simple past tense form of the verb ta meaning “takeâ€. In English, lag has to do with slowing down or falling behind. It is also a slang word for a convict or former convict and a word to describe the layer of insulation used to protect pipes. In Swedish it means “teamâ€. There are a number of other words where a deal of confusion is possible. God means “good†in Swedish and gods means “goodsâ€. Hence the old joke about the tourist who decided the Swedes must be a very religious nation because every railway station and bus station has its own Godsmottagning (Goods reception). Swedish the is English tea, rent is clean, barn is child, sent is late, mat is food, ton is tone, dock means something like “on the other hand†and vet is the imperative form of the verb veta meaning to know. In Sweden rum is both an alcoholic drink and the common word for room, just as sex means both six and sex. And every company has its chef – who may also be a cook in his or her private life but in the company is actually the boss. (What the English call a chef, the Swedes call a kock – which might lead to other problems). I could go on, but think I’d better stop now and do something more constructive. Toodloo! ———————————————————————————————————————- Note that the my source for the 1000 most used Swedish words (in newspaper texts – which newspapers and from when unspecified) is here: http://rl.se/tusen.html My plans for today were sidetracked by the Word for Today on Artwiculate.com: Disparate. Disparate means various, utterly different, unlike. Long a go I started writing a book with the working title Disparate Days. It was a memoir of the year and a half I spent as a student in Leeds, where my housemate was Jonathan Kershaw.
When he was “down†though, it was often difficult to know what to do. I had never before met someone with clinical depression (not knowingly – and it was 20 years before my own diagnosis). I just did not know what to do, but I did what seemed best at the time. He was my friend, I wanted to help, and I remembered the “ups†and tried to treat him in his depths in the same way as I did when he was happy. Sometimes I seemed to make headway, but my own humour and charisma were neither of them catalytic, and when Jon climbed out of a low I think he did it more by himself (or with help from the medication he was sometimes prescribed). It seems very odd to me now, but it never crossed my mind to discuss with anyone my difficulties when Jon was down. Anyone not a fellow student that is. Jon himself had a very good relationship with the college Chaplain, who I met, but never thought to approach for advice. Years after, meeting him again, the man said “I had no idea you were coping with him on your own. Why didn’t you come to me?â€
Still, I look back on the experience and on Jonathan with great warmth. I learned so much more about myself and about others, and had so much fun as well as heartache. Later in life, with more experience, I began to see things about Jonathan that I didn’t see at the time, or saw but didn’t know how to interpret. I’m fairly sure now that he was a repressed homosexual. Not gay. Gay doesn’t seem to me at all a satisfactory description. He wasn’t queer either. Peculiar, yes, eccentric, inspirational, brilliant, beautiful. All of those. And someone who was deeply unsure of his own sexuality. It didn’t help, I think, that he was as attractive to men as he was to women.
At the time, as I say, I didn’t see what seems so plain now. Though I found his personality so attractive, though I regarded him as my best friend, I did not feel any sexual attraction to Jon myself. I made the common hetero assumption that he was “like meâ€, and I made a mistake that has embarrassed me ever since. We had a friend, she was closer to Jon than to me and not a student with us but someone Jon had met when he was doing voluntary work after dropping out the first time. Eileen stayed with us in the house in Leeds. She was in love with Jon and came and asked me whether I though she should tell him, whether she had a chance. I was a fool. Couldn’t think of anything but that if a girl told me she was in love with me how happy I would be. (I was lonely and had no girlfriend – but that’s another story.) So I encouraged her to speak up. It was an utter disaster. I never learned exactly what happened, but I saw the consequences. Eileen left us hurriedly and Jon tipped over into another depression. Ten years later, after I moved abroad, after Jon moved to the West Country, after years of medication and psychotherapy and organ playing in village churches, he found a sort of peace at last. He took his own life. Jon believed in a life after this, but as a Christian, he also believed it was wrong to kill himself. I hope he found his God more forgiving than some of His mortal mouthpieces. Those days in that student house, they were disparate in ways it’s hard to describe in a short (now rather long) Internet article. That’s why I thought I needed a book. And, who knows, I might still write it. (Though with my track record that seems a tad unlikely.)
I spent the whole morning writing the above and searching through boxes for a decent photo of Jon. I know I’ve got a couple, but could I find them? The above are all photos of photos. The last from a memorable week’s sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Â Jon and I and Eileen and her sister shared the boat, but only Jon knew anything about sailing. We learned a lot – including (I speak for myself) a wealth of swearwords I never knew before – and never knew Jon knew either.
I don’t know when I first saw Fantastic Voyage. I’d like it to have been at a matinée performance when it was released in Britain in the autumn of 1966, but I suppose that’s unlikely. (I would only have been 8 years old.) In all probability I saw it first on television sometime in the early 70s. The puzzling thing is, though, I think I remember the colours, but I don’t think we had a colour TV at the time. Now the Oscar-winning special effects seem dated. The sea of arterial red corpuscles looks suspiciously like a back-projected close-up of a lava lamp. But lense flares (for example in the picture below) do hint at one of the effects JJ Abrams was trying to recreate in his recent ‘re-envisioning’ of Star Trek. (See here.) Still, the scenes with the miniaturised submarine voyaging through a human body to deliver a surgical team to an otherwise inaccessible blood clot impressed me no end. It was one of the things that motivated me to achieve the high grade I did in my Biology O-level when I was 16. (Grade 2. I did better in Biology than in English Language. Which may not surprise any of my former students who have had the pleasure of studying English with me!) Here are some of the great lines from the film I could have used but didn’t:
One other thought: In American films and TV series, 80% of the time, if one of the characters speaks in a British English accent, you know that’s the villain. Fantastic Voyage is no different. As soon as Donald Pleasence opens his mouth you know he’s the bad guy.
Taking this film as my subject here also gives me an opportunity to brush off and republish my original review. (‘Review’ doesn’t seem quite the right word, but judge for yourself here.) Star Trek is a film with a wonderful flora of quotes, but so many of the good ones are in-jokes for fans of the original series. I choose to illustrate instead one of the most puzzling features of the future. The lack of development in prosthodontics. Poor Leonard Nimmoy, the original Spock, reappears (through one of those handy wormholes in the time-space continuum that Science Fiction films thrive upon), sucked away from 24th century, and masticates his lines through what appear at times to be rather ill-fitting dentures. In my imagination I hear him advising his younger self.
————————————————————————————- The official site for Star Trek (2009) here.
As chance would have it, the first film I watched was Tim Burton’s remake of The Planet of the Apes from 2001. It’s not a better film than the 1968 original, but it’s not nearly as poor as the reviews made out – those I read when it first came out and which put me off seeing it on the cinema screen. Some of the actors behind the mask produced some really fine performances. Tim Roth and Paul Giamatti were outstanding, I thought, and Helena Bonham Carter was pretty damn good too, though her mask was less convincing. Anyway, my nomination for the best line from the film has to be this one. Spoken by Paul Giamatti as the orangutan slaver, Limbo, who is selling humans as slaves:
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Both books are wonderful and inspirational, in terms of the foods they discuss and in terms of the writing style. The Kitchen Diaries describe meals Nigel Slater makes with fresh vegetables or fruit from his own garden or with (mostly) locally produced fresh ingredients bought at shops and markets near where he lives. The food is seasonal and that means I have a hope of emulating some of the recepies here in Sweden (something my sister, the giver, had in mind I suspect), if I allow for the spring-time lag and the autumn acceleration. Slater seems to live in the south of England – London – so especially his spring and autumn are longer, more drawn out. Gothenburg lies on the same parallel as Aberdeen, but tends to have more continental-style winters: longer and colder. Toast (sub-title: The story of a boy’s hunger) is broken into short, evocative chapters. Mostly these have titles like “Christmas Cakeâ€, “Rice Puddingâ€, “Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delightâ€, but occasionally there is a title that is not the name of a food. “The Lunch Box†is about Josh the gardener, “Percy Salt†turns out to be the name of the grocer’s where Nigel’s mother does her shopping. Each chapter encapsulates a food-related memory and opens a glimpse into a boy’s childhood in the 1960s, which bears close comparison to my own childhood memories also from the 60s. Very satisfying. I am so captivated by both these books that I have to read sections of them aloud over the dinner table. We are eating a spaghetti carbonara with a typically Swedish salad of grated carrot and thinly sliced summer cabbage which I have enlivened with rounds of a red spring onion and a simple vinaigrette dressing. (Nigel Slater: His influence!) So I read Slater’s account of his family’s first and only attempt to make spaghetti bolognese. This sets us off remembering. I too remember the long blue packets of spaghetti, “for all the world like a great long firework†and the way the strands, dumped into a pan of boiling water “splay out like one of those fibre-optic lightsâ€. But my Mum had had an Italian boyfriend before she married Dad, so she knew how to cook spaghetti, and to make a bolognese sauce that didn’t come from a can. Like Slater’s family, though, we also had powdered parmesan shaken from a cardboard drum, and I also remember thinking “this cheese smells like sickâ€.
We put away a bottle of red wine between us (this is still the lag of celebrating my birthday) and I think how much fun we’re having with these memories and how easy it would be to emulate Nigel Slater and write a book about Swedish food as a memory trigger. About how it would be popular on both sides of the North Sea. Ha! The following morning, sitting here at my keyboard, I can’t remember clearly a single anecdote or incident. Curse that red, red wine! Agneta’s memories of spaghetti in tomato sauce are all from her bamba (barnmatsbespisning = school dinner hall).
(I do know that’s not quite the lyric.) The following picture illustrates my general feelings regarding my birthday. I think the red things are strawberries and the brown doodahs are made of chocolate. Â Enjoy!
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