Re: Cheap, shallow and super: French deficiencies

Andreas Johansson scripsit:

> Some of my fellow foreign exchange students here reacted with
> incredulous hilarity when I, for reasons better left unexplained,
> accidentally made them aware there's a single Swedish verb meaning
> "to pull someone's hair" (_lugga_). They eventually concluded that
> Swedes must be a very violent bunch to have need of a such word.
My candidate for Preposterous Swedish Verb is _fitta_ 'to give birth to
pigs', which I learned about when reading an article on American-immigrant
Swedish, in which dialect the sense changed to be the same as English
_fit_.  (This is a common pattern in immigrant dialects, the most
well-known case probably being _sciabola_, which in Italian means 'sabre'
but in American Italian has rather the sense of 'shovel'!)

Much later I discovered that English does have the verb _farrow_; it's
certainly not well-known, except perhaps to pig farmers.

--
He made the Legislature meet at one-horse       John Cowan
tank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that     jcowan@reutershealth.com
hardly nobody could get there and most of       http://www.reutershealth.com
the leaders would stay home and let him go      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to work and do things as he pleased.    --Mencken, Declaration of Independence

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