Re: They Have a Word for It!

Matt Pearson wrote:

> My favourite 'untranslatable' Swedish word is _fika_, a verb,
> meaning roughly "to chat with friends over a cup of coffee"
> (right, Daniel?).
Yup. The usual expression is _Ta en fika_ 'take a fika.'

> When I was an exchange student in Sweden, we used _fika_ all the
> time, even when we were speaking English ("You wanna go _fika_?").
> Such a useful word.
And still muchly used. It has an interesting etymology. Or odd.
It's just the word _kaffe_ 'coffee' with the syllables reverted:
kaffe -> fika. I'm pretty sure this is from some wordgame
but I can't remember which.

Another interesting word is _fimp_ 'fag end of a cigarette'. It
comes from a wordplay game called "Fikonspråket" (the fig-language).
Basically what you do is you take the first syllable of _fikon_
'fi' and attach the second syllable of the word you want to change
(in this case _stump_ 'stump, end'), and the you take the first
syllable of the word you want to change and attach the last syllable
of _fikon_ to it. The result is _fimp stukon_ -> _fimp_.

I'm sure there is a similar game in English.

Finiel Dakon

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