please allow me to translate your chair

Re­spect the cheese form!

I have a paint­ing stu­dio at the artists res­i­den­cy, but share an of­fice on Sto­ra Bad­hus­gatan where I do my de­sign work with sev­en peo­ple, most of whom are called Lena.

All Swedish women are named Lena, and all Swedish men are named Stefan.

One day I was us­ing the os­thyv­el (slot­ted cheese slicer) on a hunk of grevé cheese, and Lena, Lina, He­le­na, and Lene start­ed yelling at me.

“We al­ways know when you’ve been in the cheese, Lau­rie! It looks like a ski-slope!”

For these scrupu­lous­ly dis­pas­sion­ate Scan­di­na­vians it is of vi­tal im­por­tance that with every slice one at­tempt to even out the cheese sur­face. Every true Swede is brought up with this daz­zling­ly mod­er­ate habit. I’m sur­prised they don’t keep a spir­it lev­el in the kitchen. Or per­haps they do!

Some ob­ser­va­tions: lagom means, “not too Much, not too Lit­tle. Just Right.” The Mid­dle Road. So­cial Democ­ra­cy. Fair­ness. Even-ness. The three bears!

The clas­sic metaphor for lagom is the stalk of ego­ma­ni­a­cal wheat: If it grows taller than the oth­ers, it’s mowed down with swift Scan­di­na­vian ef­fi­cien­cy. Show-offs are not to be tol­er­at­ed. So it comes as no sur­prise that lagom should be ex­pressed in … cheese.

Al­though Swedish is a word-poor lan­guage, they have a few gems sad­ly lack­ing in Shake­speare’s prover­bial tongue. There’s a word for the crime of wash­ing dish­es de­cep­tive­ly – in a slop­py, su­per­fi­cial way:

Fuskdiska! Fakedish­er! J’accuse!

Just what it sounds like, hjärnsläpp, or “brain drop,” de­scribes the blank spot in mem­o­ry where we might com­plain of ear­ly Alzheimer’s, or a “se­nior moment.”

There’s an ono­matopoe­ic word for a per­son who is “dreamy, root­less, un­de­cid­ed,” with a soupçon of the hip­pie-dip­py: flum­mig.

You can even call some­one a dust bun­ny, or tor­rboll. But only if they’re re­al­ly boring.

Back in the day, there was an ex­pres­sion for a cell phone: jup­pinalle, or “Yup­pie Ted­dy Bear.”

This has fall­en from use, be­cause Swe­den is the most wire­less na­tion on earth, and has been on­line since ear­ly days. I just made that up but it’s true. Not only yup­pies but every sen­tient be­ing with an op­pos­able thumb is cud­dling a phone.

Swedish in­vec­tive is adorably tame. You can tell some­one off by say­ing, Dra dit pep­parn väx­er – i sydamerika!

Trans­la­tion: “Go where the pep­pers grow, like – South Amer­i­ca!” What this re­al­ly means is “Go fuck your­self. And do it as far away from here as possible!”

Sad­ly, The Square (2017), a Swedish film about the art world, fea­tures a lu­natic suf­fer­ing from Tourette’s syn­drome shout­ing “camel toe!” in Eng­lish – why? If you want to say “camel toe,” it’s mum­mel­byxa.

Mum­ble pants!

To round out our Swedish les­son, let me cor­rect a mis­con­cep­tion. Con­trary to a cru­el myth found­ed on cor­po­rate envy, the word IKEA does not mean “wob­bly” in Swedish.

Wob­bly is os­tadig. Or ving­lig.

IKEA is in fact an acronym for In­g­var Kam­prad Elm­taryd Agun­naryd.

Aren’t you glad you asked? In­g­var Kam­prad, Ikea’s bil­lion­aire founder, says in his 1999 book, Lead­ing By De­sign: The IKEA Sto­ry that his youth­ful af­fil­i­a­tion with the Nazi Move­ment in Swe­den was “the great­est mis­take of my life,” but in my opin­ion that hon­or should go to the in­eluctably hideous By­hol­ma Marieberg Arm­chair.

See?

 

—lau­rie rosenwald

Flom­mist Lau­rie Rosen­wald is an Amer­i­can il­lus­tra­tor, au­thor, artist, and de­sign­er. Copy­right © 2020 Lau­rie Rosenwald.

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