Sweden’s three-letter words

Press, 4 June 1982, Page 13

Sweden’s three-letter words

From

CHRIS MOSEY

in Stockholm

. The Swedish welfare state, which aims to care for citizens from- the cradle to the grave, is also bent on saving

motorists from the threat of three-letter words. There are very few rude words in. Swedish but the ones that do exist are nearly all three letters instead of the Anglo-Saxon four. FAN, for example, means “devil” and is considered a tremendously naughty word. It has duly been banned by the National Road Safety Administration, the organisation whose job it is to censor car number plates. Sometimes quite innocent three-letter words are banned. FEL, which is Swedish for “wrong,”. was condemned as ■ . dangerous. “Words like that might distract a driver’s attention and

constitute a road safety hazard,” says Tore Bertilsson, information officer of the censorship committee. “Politically contentious words or combinations of initials must be ruled out too. FNL (initials of. the Vietcong political wing) was tremendously controversial during the Vietnam war. Of course, nowadays nobody would raise an eyebrow. I really can’t remember if it is still banned or not. “Gay, on the other hand, is now the subject of a fierce debate, even though it doesn’t’ mean anything in Swedish. It really is a dreadful problem. Quite innocent

words can suddenly became highly inflammable.” The .committee is compiling a list of all the threeletter words banned from Swedith number plates. “We have got as far as K,” Bertilsson says “The list has to be constantly revised as we go along. . “What happens is that members of the public contact .us if they think a word should be banned and the committee takes a decision.” GOD is banned. In Swedish it means “good” or “tasty.” So is GUD, which does mean God. . ’ '■. Bertilsson once had to investigate a complaint

against his own number plate, the letters of which spell BOW. In Swedish the word

means nothing at all — but only on the face of it. Closer investigation reveals that the letter “W” is not a natural part of the Swedish alphabet. Instead it gets lumped together with “V.”

So BOW can be BOV, and BOV means “crook.” “There was a lot of discussion, but in the end it was decided not to ban it,” Bertilsson says. LSD is out, as is KDS, initials of the Christian Democratic Party in Sweden. But VPK, initials of the Communist Party, is permitted. In an admirable demon.stration of Sweden's commitment to neutrality, both CIA and KGB are allowed.