Letter from Iceland #82

The Little Book of Icelandic "Ó mæ" edition

Halló!

Today in our Little Book of Icelandic installment we will look at the Icelanders’ proclivity for using the little letter “ó” as a replacement parts of compound words.

View from the hot tubs outside the town of Tálknafjörður, a.k.a. not Tálknó

To wit:

Ó my!

The Icelanders have this curious habit of shortening long words by truncating them somewhere in the middle and slapping an “ó” (pronounced “oh”) on the end. There appears to be no rhyme or reason as to why some words are given the “ó” treatment and some are not. Like, say, why the town of Patreksfjörður is colloquially called Patró but its neighbour Tálknafjörður is not called Tálknó. Just as an example.

I sometimes wonder if this “ó” business has grown out of the Icelandic habit of taking things down a notch if they are too formal (because most Icelanders are intensely uncomfortable with anything too formal). Or maybe because it is considered cool in Iceland to be a little bit kærulaus (a word that falls somewhere between flippant and careless) and using ó-words is just a little bit kærulaust.

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