Common Expressions

In my Norwegian class one day we learned some common expressions and sayings. After all the work they had us go through to learn the different tenses of verbs, that day we found out that if the verb is obvious, it can just be skipped altogether.




Why in the world would it be okay to leave out a key element in a sentence? The only thing that made sense was something my husband, Kory, told me one time. As a kid, when he sat down at the dinner table, he was required to be silent so his parents could talk. He thought he wasn’t allowed to speak because there must be only so many words that could come out of his mouth in a lifetime, and that he wasn’t supposed to use them all up as a child…. Such is the logic of his young mind, but I have no idea behind the logic in the rule of leaving out the verb.



It’s very weird to hear someone say, “I can Norwegian,” (“Jeg kan norske.”) It’s allowed to leave out the verb “speak” because it’s obvious what goes there (more obvious to some than others, I suppose). So it’s possible to hear people say things like, “I will the store” or “I must to class.” Why not just say “GO” right in there with the sentence, as it’s not a very big word, even in Norwegian? But then, Norwegians are known to be quite the conservers. They don’t even waste a breath, as they often talk while sucking in air.



It’s common when talking to someone, that they make a sound like they just choked on something. They suck in a breath at the same time they say, “Ja” (“yes”). It’s as if what they are agreeing to couldn’t even wait until their next breath was taken and their comment has to come out immediately. I don’t get it, but then I don’t get a lot of things Norwegian - like the expression, “Kan du slå på tråden?” Word for word that is translated as, “Can you hit me with a thread?” or “Can you punch me with a string?” – it could go either way as the words used mean both things. That’s the literal translation, but the meaning is something that could never be guessed: “Can you give me a call?”



I’m sure there are weird English expressions we have as well, but since I’m so used to them they don’t exactly come to mind. “Can you hit me with a thread?” Where do they come up with this stuff?

Newspapers

Reading the newspaper in Norway is right up there with talking about the weather or complaining about taxes. I read a travel book of Norway while on the ferry one day– it was translated to English and it highlighted every town along the coast. Each city’s description started off like this: Aalesund, population: 40,000; newspaper subscriptions: 38,000. Several cities had nearly as many newspaper subscribers as they have residents.




I thought about that for a while and wondered how that could be since children wouldn’t be subscribers... but then I figured it out. In our city alone there were no less than four major newspapers, two local ones and two national ones. Everyone I know reads two or three of them a day. It’s the national pass-time.



The newspapers in Norway aren’t anything at ALL like the American ones where the motto is “If it bleeds, it leads.” In fact, Norwegian newspapers are mostly human interest stories (somewhat like the LaConner Weekly News!) and the bad news is buried somewhere in the middle and not at all highlighted. Norwegians don’t like to hear bad news.



There are very few advertisements in Norwegian papers (the bulk of the pages have no ads whatsoever) and they are all in full color – every page. Of course, each paper costs about four dollars a day, but people still buy them and read nearly every word. They report on even the slightest of details.



Norway doesn’t have the censorship in newspapers like they do in America. They don’t omit a word, and swear words are often in the headlines. (They actually HAVE freedom of speech in Norway as no one can lose a job or get sued for something they say.) They also have at least one naked body picture a week in the paper, as nudity in Norway means nothing. It’s just the human body and they don’t have any modesty when it comes to that (that was a little hard to get used to).



On the whole, newspapers are pretty interesting as they highlight a lot of local people and what they are doing in their jobs or with their spare time. I’m sure everyone that lives in Norway has been written up in the newspaper more than once in their lifetime. I guess it’s the way Norwegians feel connected to one another, without actually having to talk to each other and dare risk sharing their feelings.

Taxes

Every job in Norway pays a livable wage. I could have gotten a job flipping burgers for twenty eight dollars an hour. It’s not the money that attracts people to jobs, it’s the job itself. People end up doing what they really want to do for a living – not doing something just for money. (That concept is NOT American.) Recently Norway reduced their maximum tax bracket from 92% to 50% so now there is starting to be more diversity in standard of living. It used to be everyone was taxed in such a way that they all took home about the same amount.




Most people working full time make around fifty grand a year and nearly half of that goes to taxes. One of the national pastimes is complaining about taxes, but Norwegians all live upper-middle class lives compared to Americans. Many have cabins, all go on nice vacations, most drive new cars, and everyone has a decent house. Go figure. But Norwegians actually get something for the taxes they pay. They have no medical insurance premiums and minimal medical expenses ($150 per year). They have no property taxes. They don’t have to save for retirement or pay for their children’s education as those are provided for by the government, and they don’t have to worry about becoming disabled because Norway pays well for disabilities. When I think about where the bulk of our money goes in America, I worry about the rising costs of medical expenses and insurance, Kaleb’s college fund, and property taxes. No such worries plague Norwegians.



Income tax isn’t the only source of revenue in Norway, however. Sales tax is 26% on everything, including food, but it’s built into the price, so there is no math to do before going to the cash register. New cars have a 100% sales tax and most things brought in from outside Norway have a 300% import tax (which is most everything and why it’s so expensive to live there.)



I read in a Norwegian newspaper that the leading cause of death is cardiovascular related - a whopping 39% of deaths are from that and another 25% are from cancer. That’s 64% of people in Norway dying from either heart attacks or cancer, and while that seems incredibly high – the average age of death in Norway is 78 - so the bulk of those deaths are from old people. And if the only sure things in life are death and taxes, it’s guaranteed that if the taxes in Norway kill you, they will also pay for your funeral.

Sentence Structures

The Good Teacher Inga asked me one day to tell our entire Norwegian class what I did on Saturday – in Norwegian, of course. It was a humbling experience. I know many verbs. I know a lot of nouns. I even know all the pronouns in objective and subjective form. I know how to say nouns as singular or plural. I know how to say verbs past tense or present tense, but I have yet to figure out how to form a proper sentence.




When I was learning Spanish in college, the big thing to remember was the adjective comes after the noun – they don’t say “green tree” – they say “tree green.” If only Norwegian could be that simple. They have all kinds of things mixed up. Their “the”s come after the noun (“tree the”) the negative comes after the verb (“married NOT”), and the second word in the sentence always HAS to be a verb. Their word order (sentence structure) is completely different than English and even now I’m still clueless.



Whenever I write something down and read it to Kory he reminds me I can’t just take an English sentence word for word and translate it to Norwegian – I have to translate the entire sentence and “think like a Norwegian.” OK, “I have it out figured NOT.” Lord help me the day I start thinking like the Norwegians!



I do get a kick out of some of the words Norwegians use to name things though. You can clearly see their thinking when (translated) they named a pencil sharpener a “pencil eater,” and an eraser a “learning wash.”



When we sing songs in church, they will have a song on the overhead with words that have just one to three letters in them – jeg, vil, liv, får, håp, alt, meg, gud, så, med, du, i, å, det, om… so many small words that mean so much. But when I go to school, I see words that should be an entire sentence in themselves – like “voksenopplæringssenter,” which translated means “the grown-up people’s higher learning center.”



I guess the Norwegian’s solution to the dilemma I face, is to combine all the complicated words into just one word rather than to try and figure out where all those words would go in the sentence. Maybe I should start thinking like a Norwegian after all.

Rain

A lot of emphasis was put on learning the words for weather in my Norwegian class. It’s the number one topic of conversation in Norway, especially along the coast where we lived. The Good Teacher Inga wanted to be sure we knew all the possible ways to say just how horrible of a day we were having. (We even learned the word for “complain.”) One day we learned the expression to use when it’s raining about as hard as it can. In America we might say “It’s raining cats and dogs,” but in Norway they say it’s raining “Trollkjerring” – which literally translated means it’s raining “female trolls.”




I almost felt like I’d stepped into that zone where the Eskimos in Alaska have 26 words to describe snow. It’s something like that in Norway – they are far more descriptive in their weather words (especially on the types of possible rain) than we are in America, but one day The Good Teacher Inga simplified things for us and said there are usually just two seasons in Norway – the white winter and the green winter. I thought that was pretty funny.



We started many school days off singing a song about rain. We even memorized a poem about playing in the rain. Norwegians do everything in the rain and even though they get a lot of it, the residents of Aalesund (where we lived) take great consolation in the fact that Bergen always gets more.



Even when it was pouring down rain and I often saw entire families out for bike rides all dressed in raingear from head to toe.



Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I was raised that if the sun is out, I should be out in it. When I moved to California to go to college, I didn’t clean my house for a whole year as I kept waiting for a rainy day to stay indoors and clean. It finally dawned on me that it wasn’t ever going to rain so I should probably get busy. It was the opposite in Norway - I eventually bought some rain pants so I could go out walking with friends.



We had pretty good weather the year we lived in Norway though. The year before we arrived it rained nearly every day. As Kory’s cousin was summing up how bad that year had been he said, “Summer came, but I was sitting on the toilet, so I missed it.”

Standardized Foods

Theresa, a friend I made while living in Norway, told me that it’s very important for Norwegians to feel “safe” and in control of the foods they eat. She said they get great comfort from the predictability of having the same foods over and over their entire lives. Her grandfather, who is in his eighties, only wants his fish cooked one certain way – boiled in salt water – with no sauces or other flavorings on it whatsoever. Boy does that sound like my husband, who is in his sixties.




When we were first married, I made Kory some blackened fish which I thought was fantastic, but Kory quickly informed me that he likes his “fish to taste like fish.” I tried my favorite lemon chicken recipe on him from a gourmet cookbook and I got “I like my chicken to taste like chicken.” And so I learned… Norwegians aren’t into spices or any kind of fancy foods… they just boil something in salted water and call it good.



Theresa told me her grandfather refused to try any of the “new foods” that have entered Norway these past few years – like pasta or rice – but she did talk him into having a piece of pizza once. Only once.



The whole food thing in Norway is so weird (and boring), but they obviously have gotten used to some basic foods and it works for them. In America, we want different things all the time and the packages here are always changing because things are “new and improved.” In Norway they brag that they DON’T change the food - “original recipe since 1971,” is says on the package.



Change is NOT good when it comes to food in Norway. Norwegians find something they like and they stick with it. I guess it comes from a tradition of not having many options, as it’s only been recently that faster transportation has been able to bring other kinds of foods into the country and then combine that with the fact that change obviously happens very slowly when such stubborn people are involved in the process.



Kory was very pleased when I told him what my friend Theresa shared with me about Norwegian’s attitude toward food. He felt so validated. But he was even more pleased when I made him salmon for dinner that night, with boiled potatoes and boiled carrots using no spices whatsoever. Our marriage is safe.

Words for Stores

After we spent far too much time in my Norwegian class learning words for different colors, The Good Teacher Inga decided to also teach us the names for the different kinds of stores. Everyone began to yell out the names of stores they knew, or they yelled out English names, wondering what it’s called in Norwegian – like a butcher shop, hardware store, etc.




There was one woman in our class, Valentina, that never participated in any of that kind of dialog as she can’t speak a word of English and perhaps only two words of Norwegian. She is from Russia, and she’s a fairly hunched over, wrinkled up little old woman who never understood a thing that was going on. I was shocked to learn she was only 55, because looking at her, I was sure she was 70. Whenever she was called upon to give an answer, she just nervously looked back and forth over her shoulder hoping the person behind her would pipe up, or she’d look to other Russian women in the room to translate just what it was she was supposed to say, then she’d always shake her head, look down, and say nothing.



The day we learned about the names of stores was the first time she spoke in class. We had the names of every possible specialty store written up on the board and were about to go on to the next subject, when this little old Russian lady pipes up very loudly and shouts out in perfect English, “sex shop!” The entire classroom burst out with hysterical laughter and The Good Teacher Inga couldn’t bring herself to even say a word for at least five minutes as she kept doubling over with tears streaming down her face. It was the most unexpected input, from the least likely source. Valentina didn’t even laugh herself as she was completely clueless as to why it was so funny.



I told Kory this story when he got home from work. I also lamented over the fact that all the women in my class are married to Norwegian men and it’s obvious there is no possible way for many of them to be communicating with their husbands as they don’t know any Norwegian and their English is negligible. Kory said to me, “I don’t know why you are so shocked by it. It’s the perfect relationship.”