Letter from Iceland #97
The Little Book of Icelandic "two stories, one sweater, one toilet" edition
Góðan og blessaðan daginn!
I hope you are having a lovely Saturday morning. 😊
In today’s installment from the Little Book of Icelandic I am telling stories about the supposed origin of two common words in the Icelandic language: namely peysa (sweater, or jumper) and klósett (toilet).
Two stories
Some words have wonderful narratives attached to them. Now, I cannot attest to whether or not these are absolutely, unequivocally true, but I can tell you that I did not make them up. They were told to me. And now I am telling them to you. Because, veracity aside, they’re great stories, and I really hope they’re true.
1. THE STORY BEHIND PEYSA
Peysa
Pronounced: P-eh-sa (think of the way Canadians say “eh”)
Meaning: sweater/jumper/cardigan
In the old days there were some French sailors who fished off the coast of Iceland, especially the East Fjords. They regularly came ashore looking to trade stuff, and one of the things they wanted to have was Icelandic sweaters. My educated guess is that they were sometimes cold and needed something to keep them warm (I won’t elaborate on the fact that there exists a strain of dark-haired, brown-eyed people from the area that trace their ancestry back to those French sailors. You can make of that what you will). Anyway, such sweaters could usually be purchased from the farmers in the area, and the sailors would point to the sweaters of the Icelanders they encountered and say “paysan ... paysan” which in French means “farmer”. The Icelanders, however, thought they were referring to their sweaters and started calling them peysan, or “the sweater”. And that is why today we call a sweater (or jumper, to you UK folk) peysa in Icelandic.
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