Monday, November 1, 2010

Molboland/Gotham/Place where simpletons are from

molboland noun Mols, about the same as Gotham
In Kunnskapsforlaget's Norsk-engelsk stor ordbok. This definition refers to Gotham, the village in Nottinghamshire, England. There is a nursery rhyme about the residents of the village being imbeciles. I had never heard the nursery rhyme and am sure many others have not either. When I hear "Gotham" I think of New York City or the fictional city that his home to Batman. And I am sure many more people have these associations than the village in Nottinghamshire. This definition should include a description (home of fools, imbeciles, simpletons, etc.), because I suspect a majority of English speakers would not have the intended association with "Gotham." And if you don't know about this meaning of Gotham, the definition doesn't help you understand the significance of "Mols" or "molboland."

Thursday, March 4, 2010

springa på bio/keep running to the cinema/go to the movies

springa på bio (toaletten) keep running to the cinema (lavatory)

This is from Norstedts stora svensk-engelska ordbok. And predictably just the dictionary's use of cinema and lavatory, which I find to be extremely uncolloquial mely in American English, bugged me. But obviously cinema and lavatory are actual English words that are fully intelligible. What bugs me is that the two don't seem to mean the same thing.

To "keep running to the lavatory" would imply that you are continually being interrupted by your need to go to the bathroom. I have no idea what it would mean to "keep running to the cinema." That would seem to imply that you don't stay there very long, like not long enough to see a movie, which begs the question: why the heck are you going there if not to see a movie? So, wondering if perhaps I'm crazy to object to this phrase (maybe it's a completely common thing to do in the UK--how would I know?), I looked up "keep running to the cinema" on Google. Zero hits. I am vindicated. Zero Internet hits for an English phrase is pretty much proof that no one says it.

If you search the Swedish phrase "springa på bio," however, you will find that people do indeed use that phrase. In fact, I got 174,000 hits for it. That's a lot of hits for a smallish perfusion language like Swedish. Based on context, it would appear that this is a completely normal way to say "go to the movies" in Swedish.

Not sure why the good folks at Norstedts couldn't include a viable translation for the phrase. "Go to the movies" gets well over a million hits.