Monday, January 16, 2012

Shooting Party

Today I discovered the Swedish for shooting board is "stötlåda", and translates as "box for shooting". Who knew?* In Ikea it's probably also the name for a bookcase... Here in Merrie Olde Englande, a shooting box is a small house to accommodate shooting parties. Apparently. Who knew (again)?

See? Doesn't even take a foreign language to surprise me.

But as a result, in my head I now have an image of happy woodworkers gathering together at a small country house for a shooting party - bringing their favourite shooting planes, having a square-off, and possibly pinning the tail on the Donkey's Ear. It sounds like fun. Although it occurs to me that after enough drinks (Shots, obviously) absolutely no-one would be able to tell if your shooting board gave a 90° (or 45°) result, so you'd maybe have to schedule the square-off for early in the festivities.

I've been giving this entirely too much thought, haven't I? So shoot me ;)

*Yes, yes, all the Swedish speakers out there may put their hands down now. Thank you.

5 comments:

  1. Dammit Alf, coffee and keyboards
    don't mi

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  2. If previous generations of my family are anything to gauge by, drinking and shooting until nothing's quite straight or square is definitely a job for a swede. So I wouldn't count them out entirely...

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  3. That Swedish word comes very close to the German Stoßladen. Same ethymology I guess. Here in The Netherlands we say "futselplank". Plank is easy, that's the Dutch word for board. But I have no idea what the Futsel means and where it comes from.

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  4. If no drinks were proffered, only light snacks, a woodworker may well turn up to your party eat shoots and leaves.

    With apologies to Lynn Truss

    Andy

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  5. Plank with an "a" at the end is "planka", and that is Swedish for board. And Swedish, it is in the same language tree as German, Dutch and English. There are quite a fiev words that comes from SwedishNorweganDanish.
    But that is a other story!

    Cheers

    Johan from Sweden.

    ReplyDelete

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