A Disorienting Moment (Warning: I am working with the Swedish by memory in the following...I will correct errors and replace them if necessary)

"Frys Ögonblicket!"

The above quote translates to "Freeze the Moment" in English. This was on a poster at a major chain coffee shop that I went to today in Stockholm. This slogan, as a marketing campaign at a Swedish chain coffee shop, is one of the most extraordinarily odd things I have ever seen. Allow me to explain.

It is obviously a play on the Latin phrase "Carpe Diem!" This would be most accurately translated in Swedish as "Grip Dagen!," which means "Seize the Day." In the slogan from the coffee shop they are playing on the phrase "Seize the Moment," or "Grip Ögonblicket" in Swedish. The advertisement is pushing a line of frozen coffee/tea beverages for the summer months. The phrase "Frys Ögonblicket!" translates to "Freeze the Moment!" in English. It seems clever and appropriate in many ways, but I hope everyone is starting to see how strange this is.

In order for the pun, "Frys Ögonblicket," to have the sense that it ought to have it must be translated into English. When it is rendered "Freeze the Moment" it becomes clear that it is playing on the phrase "Seize the Moment." In Swedish it lacks this sense altogether. The two Swedish phrases, "Frys Ögonblicket" and "Grip Ögonblicket," are not the phrases that are intended in the advertisement. Rather this is a Swedish ad directed at a Swedish demographic, which relies on being rendered instantaneously and transparently into its English equivalent. It would mean nothing to the average English speaker with no Swedish training, and it would not be a very effective marketing campaign if it required a translatory effort by its Swedish target.

I cannot convey how bizarre it seems to me, as a native English speaker, to have your language so pervaded by the alien that a marketing campaign, which is obviously researched and directed for effectiveness, assumes such insideness of a foreign language as to have a pun that requires almost a threefold translation without effort. What does this say about the Swedish experience of their own language? Well, it suggests to me that the average Swede does not speak a Swedish that relates to English as a vertical or layered relationship (requiring conscious translation in each instance). Rather it would seem that for Swedes English and Swedish co-exist in the same linguistic structure!

I have mentioned before that language is often understood today, structurally, as a relational web. Words are not "word-things" that are linked to one another, and then the material world, by linguistic fibers. The entire structure itself is a nondiscrete web in which the name or word serves to take hold for a moment of a more playful and loose linguistic entity which is "carried over" into knowledge through a solidifying metaphor...the "concept" ("metaphor" derives from a Greek word for "carrying over"). The common understanding that a word gets its "sense" or meaning by naming some substantial thing in the material world is not the case. Words mean because of the way they relate to other words. Words are not so static as to make a one-to-one relationship to phenomena (which themselves may in turn only seem so static by the illusory stasis of the word) ...they only seem to be static by virtue of their forgotten poesy...we forget we are working with a metaphor that only takes hold of, for the moment, (Carpe Diem!) a fluid relational web.

Let us take for an an example the word "carpe" itself, which does not literally translate to "seize," but in any case the idea of seizing or laying hold is satisfactory. Think of another word that shares a root with carpe...carpals, which is the name for the bones in our hands. Very often we use metaphors on grasping or laying physical hold of things in order to suggest the meaning of understanding or willing (comprehension, apprehension both share a root with "prehensile," which describes the way our thumbs move so as to make "taking hold" more effective). So the notion of seizing a moment, or a day, which is clearly not literally a grabbing the moment with your hand is a forgotten metaphor on laying physical hold of something with the hand. So much more forgotten because it is taken over anew from an old and foreign language.

The best quote I can think of to describe the web-nature of the linguistic is from Nietzsche in his essay "On Truth and Lying in an Non-Moral Sense." The example itself lays hold of a lovely metaphor that retains its vigour, its vitality, rather unlike "the illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour..." Of the loose and relational character of language, Nietzsche says the following:

"One can certainly admire humanity as a mighty architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water; admittedly, in order to rest on such foundations, it has to be like a thing constructed from cobwebs, so delicate that it can be carried off on the waves and yet so firm as not to be blown apart by the wind."
Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense."

So again, what does it mean for the linguistic experience of a Swede to have a structure so invaded by the "alien?" And I will not even go into the hotly contested space of what a unique linguistic experience can say about the being of he who dwells within it! Gadamer says that a language is operating properly when it disappears or is transparent behind its use. One only endeavours "into" the nature of the language as an abstraction when something has broken down, or as someone who has managed to step "outside" in a way. Of course, one does not ever delve into a language in order to consider it scientifically, because such an undertaking always is, was, and will be within the language. For the same reasons one never steps out. But, anyone who has ever taken up learning a foreign language will realize how the transparency of his/her own language is rendered conspicuous at times. In this case, however, the advertisement has to rely on the ability of the average Swedish speaker to have already so sufficiently fused with English as to relate alongside, or within it, rather than above or under! This would appear to be a fundamentally alienated language, or an entirely new language altogether.