Vørds, part 01

Or: Notes toward a Norwegian-English Dictionary



Samfunnshus, n.
 A building where people fight.

Samordning, n.
An ingenious feat of public sector restructuring and modernization wherein one fires three employees whilst keeping one of them (typically the one most personally loyal to the administration) on the payroll as an internal consultant and recruiting three new employees from the slave pits to fill out the new and simpler (but in purely quantitative terms increased) administrative paperwork, thus simplifying three administrative tasks to one and re-simplifying it to four simpler tasks and increasing Administrative Output (AO) by up to 25 %, part of which may then be effectively invested in the most loyal employee, who in his turn starts up his own consult firm toward the public sector as his colleagues are fired and the cycle begins again.

Samordna opptak, n.
A scheme for sorting students into their respective academic career, as with a shovel, theoretically saving everyone a lot of time.

Samnorsk, n.
A widely unpopular scheme for bridging the bokmål-nynorsk-divide and thus samordne the widely accepted bokmål and nynorsk languages, both state inventions in the first place.

Sametinget, n.
A scheme for sorting bribes to well-off reindeer owners whose flocks threaten to eat up Finnmark's entire local ecosystem.

Samhold, n.
Whatever hogwash makes the Norwegians do willingly whatever their chieftains tell them to, and knowing which or whose set of self-serving platitudes count as acceptable excuses for whatever one does. Key to understanding the intricate mechanics of Samordning, Sametinget etc.

Samboerskap, n.
A peculiar Protestant institution in which two adults decide to quarrel about washing dishes, vacuum cleaning the lawn etc.

Sambyggelag, n.
Previously a sort of People's Corporation, a way for citizens to build lots of houses at the same time in a way that provided affordable housing to common people through co-operation at a time when capital and building material was scarce. This meaning of the term is obsolete, as is apparently that type of organization and its corresponding form of corporate statehood. Today's understanding of the term refers to a type of investment scheme for elderly property-owners to deal with the banker and the taxman.