SIX OF SVEN

Seeing as I cannot remember his name, let's just call him 'Sven'. Sven is Swedish. Sven is drunk. Sven is almost unintelligible. Not because he's Swedish. Nice chap. One of the less sentient extras from an Ingmar Bergman film. Sven is engaged upon a profound personal meditation into the struggles of the psyche and the soul. Because he is Swedish.

First time I've seen him since before the pandemic. My friend the bookseller confuses him with a Dutchman he sees around town who is also drunk. And quite possibly unintelligle in consequence, but I didn't ask.

I, too, am Dutch. But I am stone-cold sober.
I had four cups of tea tonight.
Hepped to the gills.

Also, as a sober Dutchman, I am reasonably good with languages.

Years ago I saw two stage performances at the Stadsschouwburg (now the "Parktheater Eindhoven") which I thoroughly enjoyed: The Taming Of The Shrew, and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. The first time I went back to the Netherlands after returning to the States, I went to see a Peking opera performed by a troupe from Shenyang (瀋陽 'sam yeung') in a suburb (Veldhoven) of Eindhoven.

Despite my linguistic flexibility -- Dutch, Shakespearean English, German, Chinese, Colonial Malay, and Tokpisin, et autres -- my ability to make sense out of drunken Swedanglish is rather low. Sorry. Almost bis punkt von nix farshtay. He's a decent fellow, though.

It's a failing, I know. My bad. Drunken Swedanglish is an important language. It's crucial to grasping both the Swedish Chef and Greta Thunberg, as well as why the Vikings invaded the British Isles (though the absence of surströmming may have been responsible for that).

We Dutch like seafood. Despite it's origin in fish, surströmming is not seafood. It is, on the tongue, precisely the same as drunken Swedanglish in the ear. Or Greta Thunberg.


Other languages heard tonight were Italian, Spanish, German, Cantonese, and English.
Mostly spoken by reasonably sober individuals.
Or "sober-ish".


My evening had started with me lighting up a pipeful of Virginia and heading into Spofford Alley, enjoying the quiet of Chinatown after dark. On Grant the gabble of foreign voices was occasionally audible -- and why is it that American English is brassily loud from over a block away? -- as well as sometimes Cantonese, sotto voce, normal speaking tones. Finished my smoke ten minutes before the bus dropped off the bookseller.

The Swerdlunkard was encountered at the final stop of the evening.
The owner gave me a very big glass of tea.
She's prescient.



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