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

Comments

[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

[silverjedi]

It seems like there's a lot of this sort of thing in the world. People not knowing certain things when in fact it should be common knowledge. The same thing happens in the U.S. It most commonly shows up in geography and history. It scares people like my mom who's a teacher.

Perhaps the word has grown out of use due to technology? I'm not sure of the Swedish way of text messaging, but in the U.S., shortening words is pretty much the norm. That being a long word, it's almost certain to be shortened here. And for some strange reason, the growing use of technology in every day life has caused the use of thinking to...well...go out of style so to speak. >_< It's sad.

Nepotism looks familiar to me. I can't remember where I've seen it used before. It's not a word I normally use, however, the definition behind it I know. It's a common situation, unfortunately.

You have every right to be frightened. This is a frightening world we're living in. O_O It's often why I worry about humanity.