Entertainment For Lively Minds
Nora Ephron does Stieg Larsson
Posted by Grant on 29 August 2010 - 9:16am.
I don't think anyone's posted this link, but it's very funny indeed
http://nyr.kr/cgZ9aM
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Brilliant parody
Very amusing - have an up arrow
Excellent
But she doesn't include how everyone automatically knows the area of a home in square metres the instant they step inside.
I noticed that, too in the novels
In mitigation, though, I think the Swedish housing market is probably more sophisticated than that in the UK, because no one in the UK really knows exactly how big their home is, just the number of rooms they have. This has always intrigued me, because in the UK commercial market, everything is sold or let according to floor area, e.g. 10,000 sq ft factory, 5,000 sq ft office, etc. Why not houses?
I'm sure that house valuations in the UK would be more accurate if valuers actually bothered to make comparisons on a floor area basis.
So, with the Swedes, the size of an apartment must be a key consideration when buying or renting - with experience, you can possibly tell how big an apartment is just by looking. If Larsson was a British author, he'd probably describe a flat as having 2 bedrooms as opposed to being 100 sq m. Alternatively, Stieg Larsson was probably one of those authors who is just totally anal about such small details!
Probably funnier for Americans that it is for Swedes
There is no such thing as an umlaut in Swedish. 'Umlaut' is a German word for the two dots in the German letters ä, ü and ö.
Swedish just calls these two dots "två prickar" ("two dots"), and the two letters that use them are simply Ö and Ä, not O-umlaut and A-umlaut.
Ö and Ä have their own keys on a Swedish keyborad, so there's no need to use the Alt key.
The letter ü does not exist in Swedish, with the exception of some names/proper nouns. If you need to write a ü on a Swedish keyborad, you use the key to the right of the å and then u, so no Alt key is needed there either.
Oh, and there's no Apple store at the intersection of Kungsgatan and Sveavägen. There is, however, a very expensive menswear shop called Ströms. I've often been in there but never bought anything.
[that's enough pedantry - Ed.]
Because
over here in sunny Sweden that is EXACTLY how you describe a house. You wouldn't say you lived in a 2 bedroom flat, but instead that you live in 80 sq m. We've just moved to a 77 sq m flat from a 47 sq m and it is the first question people ask - how big is it?
So you do size up people's flats the second you walk in.
And +1 for duco01 pointing out that the diacritic isn't an umlaut - the umlaut is an accent in the german language whereas ä, ö and å are letters in their own right.
Same here!
In Berlin, it's the first thing people always want to know about a place.
I'm hitting Alt+u and it isn't doing anything.
Is this an Apple thing?
It's then on my UK laptop.
It's then on my UK laptop. (Office 2007).
Dunno about macs.