There's a clever and delightful little Swenglish play on words: "It's not the fart that kills, it's the smell. So, it's not the speed that kills you, it's the crash. If you invite your non-Swedish friends on a road trip, be prepared for adolescent humour every time you go past a police 'fartkontroll' speed check or drive into a carpark at the 'infart' entry sign.
Oh, and the Swedish word for 'fart' is 'fis' or 'prutt'. We know that Swedes have a reputation for being sexually liberal, but if your Swedish sambo ends your phone conversations by going "Puss, puss! Nor are they suddenly confusing you with a kitten. Confusingly, the Swedish word 'kiss' translates to 'pee', so beware of that one too.
Chris O'Neill giving his wife Princess Madeleine an innocent 'puss'. If a Swede tells you to meet at 8pm "prick", don't punch them in the face. Not only because violence does not solve anything, but also because they did not mean to insult you using a vulgar English slang word. In Swedish, 'prick' means 'dot'. So when the ever-so-punctual Swedes want to meet at prick 8pm, they just mean 8pm on the dot.
Meet me at 8pm, prick. If you think this sounds like something famously foulmouthed TV chef Gordon Ramsay might say, you could not be moreβ¦well, right, actually. If he were Swedish, at least. Because 'kock' is just the word for 'chef'. So do try to hide your blush when your Swedish dining companion after a particularly yummy meal in a restaurant tries to pass on his or her compliments to the head "kock".
Gordon Ramsay. What a kock. No, Swedes aren't talking about women's lingerie when you ask them how their weekend was well, probably not, anyway. The word bra means good. So when Sven says his weekend was "bra" it doesn't mean he got any action in the bedroom. Get your mind out of the gutters, folks. It just means six. Except it doesn't β it also means exactly what you think it means. It is a wonder that this one does not cause more confusion, but the fact that the Swedes somehow seem to understand when they are talking about one thing or the other shows that language is really all down to context.
