Neil Shipley on Swedish culture – the strange, the special and the sublime
It’s well-known that the Nordic countries all have jokes about each other and, in many of them, they try to make their neighbours out to be incompetent idiots.
I just heard a prize joke from a Finn about Swedes:
Question: How do you sink a Swedish battleship?
Answer: Put it in the water.
You know any more jokes?
A funny sketch is circulating around the internet from Saturday Night Live where the comedians are acting out a Swedish chat show. Full of stereotypes, it goes something like this:
‘Hurdy gurdy flurdy ja ja my vagina lurdy flurdy gago?’
‘Liga gargy murdy flurdy rollga buggla hurdy gurdy you bitch.’
And so on, you get the picture. Everyone was stereotypically blond and all of the understandable words were sex-related – yet another Swedish stereotype.
As I watched the clip, I couldn’t help laughing because, without knowing it, the comedians were actually right on the ball. I’m not talking about the Swedish chef style way of communicating but the Swedish preference for chucking English words into sentences when there is a perfectly good Swedish word to use. Why is this such a preference? Is it to sound international? Or to impress? I don’t know the answer, but it something very noticeable as you listen to Swedes conversing with each other.
Only the other day, I was listening to the radio and, although I can speak Swedish, I imagined what it would be like if I couldn’t. As it happened, the hosts were talking about sex toys, and the conversation went something like this:
‘Swedish, Swedish, Swedish, Swedish, dildo, Swedish, Swedish’
‘Swedish, Swedish, sex, Swedish, Swedish, swingers’
‘Swedish, Swedish, rimming, Swedish, Swedish, Swedish, butt plug’
Seems like the comedians weren’t that far off!
SNL Link: http://feber.se/video/art/242494/swenglish_med_snl/
You see them everywhere around town, with their red eyes and runny noses. Your hear them around you as they try to unblock the nasal congestion that is driving them to insanity. These poor people suffer from pollen allergy and, at this time of the year, just want to curl up and die, as the tree pollen assaults their noses, throats and airways. According to statistics 2 million Swedes suffer from pollen allergy, mostly related to the treachorous birch trees. These lovely trees that signal the arrival of the spring, also torture more than a quarter of the population.
Apparently, not since 2006 has the pollen assault been as bad as it has this year. So much so that the chemist shops are rapidly running out of allergy medicines and there is apparently none left to order.
So what should these poor people do? Stay inside is the cruel advice from the government.
But if 2 million people stayed indoors, then there would be nobody left to fuel the Swedish economy through work and consumption. Wouldn’t it be better just to produce more medicine? It would boost production, boost the economy and boost the poor sufferers who collapse under the anslaught of thesepollen invaders.
Watching the Swedes 