The same word in two languages may have different meanings, as we have seen. Here is another example:
Black is Swedish slang meaning broke, without money. In English, to be in the black means just the opposite, profitable, having money in the bank.
The English expression in the red means that you are in debt or that you are losing money. The idiom comes from bookkeeping, where losses were recorded in red ink.
So, to be black in Swedish is the same as being in the red in English.
You can read about many other such false friends in my book.
And if you want to learn more about English idioms, you will find some here and here. Some idioms are unique to English, while others are identical in English and Swedish.
A word in one language may be quite innocent but in another language it has an offensive meaning or may even be a taboo word. It is not difficult to find such words in English and Swedish. They are usually about sexuality or body functions. Fart is such a word.
Fart in English is what you do when you let out gas through your anus or the sound of that action. A nicer way to express this is to say break wind, which is what Old English feortan meant. The corresponding Swedish verb is fisa or prutta.
Fart in Swedish comes from Low German faren, to travel.
One type of fart
In Swedish, fart means speed,velocity, or movement. Not surprisingly, traffic signs including the word are popular objects for English-speaking tourists taking photos. Infart means entrance and utfartexit from property premises. Farthållare is Swedish for cruise control, fartkamera is speed camera, and maxfart is top speed. If you are fartblind, speed blind, you don’t realize that you are driving too fast—you have got used to the high speed. Then you may be considered a fartdåre, a speed maniac or a fartsyndare, literally ‘a speed sinner’, a speeder.
Walking pace
Elevators in Denmark often have a sign saying I fart meaning under way. An anecdote says that, during a visit by Queen Elizabeth II, somebody realized just in time what the sign meant in English, and it was rapidly covered up.
At a snail’s pace
Fart is a typical example of a false friend. False friends are words in two languages that look and/or sound similar but whose meanings are completely or partially different. See some more English–Swedish false friends here and examples from a few languages here. You can read about more than 400 English–Swedish false friends in my book (copyeditor.se/books).
I have written blog posts here since January 2019, seven years ago. Being a copyeditor and a language nerd, I find the English language both fascinating and challenging.
Dissatisfied with the wallpaper in his living-room?
After 115 blog entries, I hope that I have been able to help my readers understand English better and avoid making mistakes that could be both embarrassing and disastrous.
In the column on the right, you can find all my blog posts. You can see a list of the latest topics and you can search for a particular word that you would like to know more about.
Let me know if there is a word or an expression that you would like me to write about. And if you are writing your dissertation or a paper for a scientific journal and would like me to copyedit it before submitting, send an email to info@copyeditor.se.
Seven years after the start, this is my first blog entry in 2026. I hope there will be more.
An urban myth maintains that an ad for a vacuum cleaner from Electrolux, ”Nothing sucks like Electrolux”, caused some commotion in the USA, where it was seen as a failed campaign due to a translation error. Suck is colloquial English for being bad. However, the campaign was never launched in the USA.
The Swedish vacuum manufacturer had engaged the British agency Cogent Elliot to create the ad for the UK market in the 1960s. According to a Cogent Elliot employee, the pun ”was entirely intended as a double entendre. You know, make ’em smile…”.
So, against popular belief, the ad was not a marketing blunder but an ingenious way to create interest in a product.
The founder of Electrolux, Axel Wenner-Gren, was a marketing genius with unconventional sales ideas.
Electrolux published a short film showing an elephant crushing crisps which were all then sucked up by an Electrolux vacuum cleaner.
Electrolux had cars made that looked like big vacuum cleaners. The cars were based on a Citroën chassis.
In my previous blog post I gave an example of failed localization by a car manufacturer. It seems that the branding of automobiles is prone to localization mistakes.
When General Motors in Canada launched their Buick LaCrosse, they had to rebrand it after realizing that the name referred to masturbation in French Canadian slang.
Exactly the same mistake was made by Mitsubishi in Spanish-speaking markets. The name of their Pajero is Spanish for masturbation (the word can also refer to a lazy or stupid person).
Ford Pinto was a popular model in Europe, but when it was launched in Brazil, the importers discovered that the name is Brazilian–Portuguese slang for small penis. The car was renamed Corcel, which means horse.
A similar mistake was made by the Chinese auto maker Chana. In Brazil, chana sounds like the slang word for female genitalia, and so the name was changed to Changan.
Not a likely victim of localization
Arguably, localization is crucial for brand reputation, and it is important to know about false friends (which you can red about here).
Localization adapts content to suit local and regional norms. A product is adapted to a specific market. In business, it is crucial to understand what connotations a word may have in a certain region.
The South Korean car maker Kia presented a new model at the Geneva Motor Show in 2013. The car was named Provo, which, according to Kia, referred to the Italian word prova, test or prototype. (Provo is also the name of a city in Utah, USA.)
Rock Canyon Temple in Provo, Utah
However, the name of the car was met with strong reactions in the UK, particularly in Northern Ireland, where the name Provo is short for the Provisional IRA, an organization that was blamed for almost 2 000 deaths during the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland 1970–1997, a campaign of violence to gain independence from Britain. The Provos were also blamed for bombings and murders in England.
After a member of the British Parliament tabled a motion that said that the name would be offensive to many victims of the Provisionals, Kia issued a clear statement that they would not launch the model in the UK.
To succeed with localization, you must understand what connotations a word has for your target audience. I will have more examples of failed localization in my next blog post.
Connotations are associations and feelings that a word evokes. They can be positive, negative, or neutral. Connotations are shaped by culture and context and may differ from person to person.
The difference in connotations between two languages must, of course, be taken into consideration by those communicating in the two languages.
Connotations can be shared by many people. The English word house to most people has a neutral connotation – it means a type of residential building, especially a one-family dwelling. The word home, on the other hand, has positive connotations of warmth, security, and family life.
Connotations may differ also between languages. While the Swedish word hem has the same connotations as the English home, Swedish hus has wider connotations than English house and may refer to any residential building irrespective of size, such as a block of flats.
Another example of a word with different connotations in English and Swedish is villa. In English, a villa is a large and luxurious country house, especially in continental Europe. In the UK it is a large, detached house in a residential area, especially from Edwardian or Victorian time. Villa can also refer to a large country house of Roman times with farm and residential buildings around a courtyard. The Latin word villa meant manor, country estate.
In Swedish, a villa is a one-family house or a bungalow. The main goals in life of medelsvensson, the average Swede, are said to be villa, Volvo, vovve, a house, a Volvo, a doggie.
To make things more complicated, the Swedish word villa can also mean illusion or delusion.
A city in English refers to a large town. In Swedish, city has the connotation of downtown.
An amusing, and arguably misleading, example is North American restroom, a euphemism for lavatory or toilet. To non-native speakers the connotation with the verb rest, relax, will be natural. In my book about English–Swedish false friends I relate a story about an American who was picking up his Swedish friend at an airport. When they got in the car, the American said, ”Perhaps you need to go to the restroom?”, and without hesitation, the Swede answered, ”No, I can do that in the car”.
Restroom?
To recognize connotations is crucial in localization, by which a product is adapted to a specific market. You can read more about it here.
Finally, a denotation is the dictionary definition of a word, the objective meaning of the word.
In a previous blog post we looked at the difference between different and various.
Another word that is used when we talk about difference is diverse.
Diverse indicates that people or things are very different from each other, that they come in a great variety of possible types, styles, etc.
The club offers diverse leisure activities such as golf, hiking, and canoeing.
The bar offered a diverse drink menu.
Another use of the word (and the corresponding noun diversity) is now mainly to refer to people from different social, cultural or ethnic backgrounds, different genders, sexual orientations, etc.
President Trump issued a series of executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the public and private sectors.
Diverse comes from Latin divertere, to turn in separate ways.
The English word minute is both a noun and an adjective.
As a noun, minute is pronounced /ˈmɪnɪt/.
A minute is a period of time, sixty seconds or one sixtieth of an hour. They were twenty minutes late.
The train leaves in one minute.
Minute can also refer to a distance, how far you can walk or drive in a minute. Our house is just ten minutes from the bus stop.
Minute also indicates a very short time. Sit down, please; I’ll be with you in a minute.
In geometry, minute is a sixtieth of a degree of an angle.
The noun minute comes from Medieval Latin pars minuta prima, first small part, from minutus, made small. (Second comes from pars minuta secunda, second small part.)
The plural noun minutes refers to a record of the proceedings of a meeting. It comes via French minute from Latin scriptura minuta, small writing. The secretary read the minutes from the last meeting.
The adjective minute, pronounced /mʌɪˈnjuːt/, means extremely small. Just like the noun, it comes from Latin minutus, made small. With such a high resolution, minute details could be studied in the image.
There are many ways to express nothing in English.
ZERO
The most common way to refer to nothing as a number is zero or nought. (Nought is more common in British English.)
Zero comes from Arabic sifr (meaning ’empty’), which lives on in French chiffre and Swedish siffra. Italian zefiro comes from zephyrum, used by the mathematician Fibonacci.
OH (the letter O)
Especially when saying telephone numbers or dates, OH is used
10603 ’one oh six oh three’ or ’one zero six zero three’ 1605 sixteen oh five
And then, of course, we have the well-known secret agent James Bond, 007 ’double oh seven’.
NIL
Nil is used in sports, especially in team games.
At half-time, the score was two–nil.
American English prefers nothing to nil.
The score was three to nothing.
Nil is also used in business language.
The economy is expected to see nil growth next year.
Nil comes from Latin nihil or nihilum, which meant nothing.
Nothing, nada, zilch. Or, a polar bear couple with its cub in a snowstorm.
LOVE
In tennis scoring, love means zero. At the start of a game, the score is love–all. Six–love is called a bagel. Concerning the origin of the word love in tennis, one theory suggests that it may have come from the French l’oeuf, meaning egg. A zero could easily resemble an egg. However, this theory is disputed. There is no documented use of l’oeuf in sports meaning zero. On the other hand, zero on a scoreboard is also called a goose egg or, especially in cricket, a duck egg or a duck.
DUCK
When a batsman in cricket does not score any points (also called runs), it is called a duck egg or a duck.
NADA, ZILCH, ZIP
These are all slang words to denote nothing. Nada comes from Spanish nothing. Zilch was a comic character in an American magazine. The word could also have come from US college slang. Zip also comes from student slang, denoting a zero grade on a test.
NULL
Null is used in mathematics to represent the absence of something or the value of zero.
The word is also used in the legal phrase null and void, which implies that a contract, an agreement, etc., is not legally valid.
CIPHER
Cipher usually means a code or an encoded numeral or letter. It can also mean zero and is often used figuratively to refer to a nobody, someone of no consequence. The word is related to French chiffre and Swedish siffra. It is sometimes spelled cypher in British English.
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