swedes

The pleasantly nappy leather called suede is kennt við Sweden. I did not know this until just today, being weaker in the French part of my vocabulary than I might be. I learn that in the nineteenth century, the towns of Hälsingborg, Malmö, and Ystad produced the kidskin for gloves. Those articles must have come through francophone channels to the English-speaking world (or else they were simply so fashionable that a French name was de rigeur), for they were known as les gants de suède. This was shortened in the Anglophone mouth to suede gloves and, at least where I grew up, suede lost all association with a country and become a term for a specific material.

I add this to my list of the broader semantic footprint of Sweden and Swedes.

For example, depending on your personal variety of English, the following lines may or may not shock:

I wouldn't eat swedes until fairly recently. It's one of those childhood dislikes that carried on to adulthood. I've started eating them though and I've developed a real taste for them, to my great surprise my kids have followed suit.

I tend to hear this passage in the voice of a sort of Martha Stewart of the trolls, a thrifty giant homemaker from the mountain fastnesses of Jämtland giving advice to a neighbor on how to best prepare the locally-available humans. I suppose that she had been eating Norwegians from the next valley over before discovering the toothsomeness of the Swedes.

Though this interpretation has an undeniable charm, the subject of this snippet is actually rutabagas, a.k.a. Swedish turnips.

That is not the end of edible Swedes. I remember reading in the diaries of Nadezhda Durova (a Russian woman who rode as a cavalry officer in the Napoleanic wars) that the Polish word for pork cracklings is a homonym of the word for Swede.

Two entirely different foodstuffs are called swedes, then. It must be the result of that long-lived rivalry with their neighbors. The Danes, to my knowledge, only have danishes, and that is a dubious claim at best, because if you want a danish in Denmark you will have to ask for weinerbrød. The Swedes are ahead by one root vegetable and some fried lard.