Svågerpolitik.

[shantari]

There's something that's been nagging me lately. It started about a month ago as I was trying to get my coat out of the cloakroom at the student hang out in Skövde. (For a festivity I participated in with my brother who studies there.) Now as I was waiting for my turn, someone tried to get ahead of me using the "I know someone"-excuse. I said

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[shantari]

when a language lacking/having a certain word is used to say something about the culture where it's spoken (although the basics of the trope are that language is used to directly create a way of thinking, and maybe not so much that the language reflects the reality, although there are shades of it.)

I was thinking while I wrote the post (as I tend to overanalyze things) if maybe I could agree with him on that. But the one major failage was that it only makes sense for a word to fall out of use if there is ... no use for it. So yeah, like you said, it would be language evolution if it weren't for those few basic things. And also, major hangup: Svågerpolitik is the more basic word, so it feels extra weird for it to disappear unless Swedish is evolving to Byråkratiska, which considering that we're talking about Sweden, wouldn't really be that surprising... Okay that conclusion is actually even more frightening to me.

And yeah, about people (and especially young) being ignorant. When I mentioned the first incident to my brother, he pretty much said the same thing.

What's interesting to me is that I (and you too, right?) are at an age when we can both see how incredibly young the whippersnappers* are, and still realise that we're quite young ourselves. (For me it probably helps that I've currently been living with my grandma for a couple of years, which has given me some insights most youngsters probably don't get.) I hit the realisation that I can learn new things my entire life at a pretty young age though.

* If I can find an excuse to use the expression whippersnapper, I will use it.