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SWEDISH WORD OF THE DAY

Swedish word of the day: hemnetknarka

As the Swedish property market is coming back to life, you may find yourself picking up a new, addictive habit.

Published: 6 May 2024 11:31 CEST
the word hemnetknarka written on a blackboard next to the swedish flag
If you've ever found yourself browsing property listings in Sweden just for fun, you're probably guilty of this habit. Photo: Annie Spratt/Unsplash/Nicolas Raymond

The Swedish housing shortage is real, and anyone who’s ever faced the challenge of relocating will know how easy it is to while away entire days browsing property sites – either in a desperate attempt to find somewhere, or just to gaze at houses you know you could never afford.

Hemnet is the biggest and most well-known of these (there are others, such as Booli and Boneo), and such is its appeal to home hunters that it’s given rise to its own expression: hemnetknarka.

It’s basically the Swedish version of when your addiction to property porn starts to get out of hand, but as Swedes love compound words they instead made up a one-word verb for the phenomenon.

A total of 32,233 apartments were listed for sale on Hemnet in April 2024, 40 percent more than the same month the year before and the highest number ever for a single month, so there are more opportunities than ever to hemnetknarka.

The second leg of the word, knarka, means “doing drugs”, and it’s got an interesting history.

According to Swedish author Birgitta Stenberg, she and the poet Paul Andersson invented the word in the 1950s as a sort of slang to cover up that they were talking about narcotics.

Stenberg, a journalist, author and interpreter who travelled a lot in her youth and dated King Farouk of Egypt for a couple of years in the 50s, took a liberal view on drugs. One of her many books, Rapport, even depicts her amphetamine abuse in the 60s. She passed away in 2014.

  • Don’t miss any of our Swedish words and expressions of the day by downloading our app (available on Apple and Android) and then selecting the Swedish Word of the Day in your Notification options via the User button

Sweden today has one of the most conservative attitudes to narcotic use in the world, with governments on both sides reluctant to abandon their zero-tolerance attitude to drugs.

But rest assured that it’s perfectly legal to hemnetknarka. The only one who might take offence is your employer if you do it during work hours. Not that we would ever do such a thing, of course.

Examples

Många hemnetknarkar – men få vågar köpa

A lot of people look at property ads online – but few dare to buy (a headline in a Swedish newspaper)

Sitter du och hemnetknarkar nu igen?

Are you looking at property porn again?

Villa, Volvo, Vovve: The Local’s Word Guide to Swedish Life, written by The Local’s journalists, is available to order. Head to lysforlag.com/vvv to read more about it. It is also possible to buy your copy from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Bokus or Adlibris.

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For members

SWEDISH WORD OF THE DAY

Swedish word of the day: smutskasta

Here's a word you may have seen in the Swedish news this week.

Published: 17 May 2024 09:17 CEST
Swedish word of the day: smutskasta

Smutskasta means to smear, slander or defame someone (the legal term for defamation in Swedish is instead förtal).

It’s been part of the Swedish language since at least 1836 and literally means “dirt throwing”. Picture a politician throwing figurative dirt at a political opponent and you’ll have a good idea of what smutskasta is – which, incidentally, is why we’re talking about this word today.

A new documentary by Swedish broadcaster TV4’s Kalla Fakta programme revealed that the far-right Sweden Democrats operate a troll factory which, via anonymous accounts, orchestrate social media campaigns to smutskasta political opponents (and, controversially, allies). 

If you want to read more about that, you can do so here, but let’s now talk about the actual word instead.

  • Don’t miss your Swedish words and expressions of the day by downloading The Local’s app (available on Apple and Android) and then selecting the Swedish Word of the Day in your Notification options via the User button

The first part, smuts, means dirt or filth as you may have guessed, and comes from the Yiddish shmuts or German Schmutz.

The adjective, smutsig, can refer to a person or an inanimate object (mina kläder är smutsiga – my clothes are dirty; jag smutsade ner mig när jag jobbade i trädgården – I got dirty when working in the garden). If a room is simply untidy but not necessarily filthy or with any visible stains, you might instead say it’s ostädat (not cleaned) or rörigt (messy).  

The second part, kasta, means to throw. You can, among other things, kasta en boll (throw a ball), kasta bort soporna (throw away the rubbish), kasta ett öga på någonting (throw an eye on something – i.e. take a quick look at something), kasta i sig maten (gulp down the food), kasta loss (ropes away or up-anchor, when a boat leaves the harbour) or kasta upp (throw up – also kräkas in Swedish).

An interesting linguistic quirk means that if you want to say “smear” in the figurative sense you should say smutskasta, but if you want to talk about actually throwing dirt, it will sound more correct to the ears of Swedes to swap the words around and say kasta smuts.

Example sentences:

Jag är utsatt för en smutskastningskampanj

I’m the victim of a smear campaign

Påståendena är ett försök att smutskasta oss

The claims are an attempt at making us look bad

Villa, Volvo, Vovve: The Local’s Word Guide to Swedish Life, written by The Local’s journalists, is available to order. Head to lysforlag.com/vvv to read more about it. It is also possible to buy your copy from Amazon US, Amazon UK, Bokus or Adlibris.

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