What Am I To You?

In my first two weeks here, I’ve unfortunately managed to learn almost no Swedish, but I’ve had many conversations with my Swedish colleagues (in English) about the lack of English cognates for some extremely specific Swedish words. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past couple days, so I’m going to offer a theory that I’m totally linguistically unqualified to support: The Swedish language seems very exact and straightforward—technical, but pared down to include specific words for everything. Whereas, English is squishy, poetic and expansive. There are hundreds of ways to say things, but often you need a phrase rather than one exact word. Compared to a Swede, an English speaker talks circles around his meaning. Which is why I think I’m just going to start making up new words, or maybe throwing in the Swedish ones where our language doesn’t do the trick.

Here’s an example of what I mean: Last week, a Swedish technology news site interviewed one of Bonnier’s executives about a Web project we’re working on. I got a little nod in the article, which described me as “an American girl set alight by open source.” (Let’s ignore the phrase “set alight by”—it’s a hilariously bad translation of a Swedish idiom for “with a passion for.”) I sent the clip to my once and future boss in New York, who wondered whether they couldn’t have chosen a better word than “girl.” Wouldn’t “woman” be more professional and less condescending? So, I looked up the exact word used in the article—tjej—in a Swedish-English dictionary, and laughed out loud at the suggested English equivalents: chick, doll, dame and broad. Now, I know for sure that tjej is a Swedish word for “young woman,” with no tawdry connotations. But we don’t really have a similar word in English—for some reason, anything other than “girl” or “woman,” sounds like an insult, which I think says something interesting about our culture. Why do we have so many derogatory words for females, while we’re lacking a feminine version of the word “guy?” And don’t suggest “gal,” please. Nobody uses that word unless they’ve been watching a lot of ‘50s sitcom reruns or something.

The Swedes also have a clever and very specific system for naming relatives. Your grandma on your mother’s side would be Mor Mor—mother’s mother, while your grandma on your father’s would be Far Mor (father’s mother). And so on with grandfathers and I think aunts and uncles, too. Niklas told me the other day that he sees our generic use of the word “grandmother” as a deficiency of the language. How does the person you’re talking to know which grandma you’re discussing? I thought this was kind of funny, because there are few times when I would discuss my grandmother with someone who doesn’t know her, but I guess if it happened, at some point the other person would ask which grandma she is and we'd have to use 25 extra words that would be unnecessary in Swedish.

There’s a language teacher who comes to the Bonnier offices each week to teach English lessons to anyone who wants them, and he tells me that he sometimes hits a communication wall with his students, who don’t understand the necessity of expanding their vocabulary to include synonyms for words they already know. “What’s the point of saying ‘chagrin’ when I could just say ‘disappointment?’” one student asked yesterday. And he was sort of stumped for an answer. Um… because it’s more colorful? And it has a subtly different meaning? But the class didn’t really buy it. Why put rococo flourishes on a piece of furniture when spare, Scandinavian lines do the trick just fine?