3 ms·

Do you think the word "lagom" characterizes Sweden? It has just now occured to me that words that are hardest to translate often seem to characterize the cultur

• silentbicycle 18y ago
  That the language has a concise placeholder for such a value means that it's probably culturally significant. I don't know how much it characterizes Swedish culture as a whole, but making it as easy to consider such a thing as, say, "truth" or "freedom" in English would probably influence discussions about e.g. sustainability. Another is that English doesn't have an immediate distinction between free-no-cost and free-unrestricted, such as "libre" vs. "gratis" in Spanish. This has led to some ambiguity in Open Source discussions, so the phrase "Free-as-in-beer" gets used a lot now.