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Kålsupare

I really like the Swedish work “kålsupare”. It means “someone who is just as bad as someone else even though they hypocritically present themselves as an awesome alternative”.

It’s pronounced “CAWL SOUP a rey”; the first part sounds similar to a British “call” or the first syllable of a “collie dog”, remembering that å is more like an o than an a) and both the “kål” and the “supare” part stresses the SUP part since the “re” suffix don’t count towards the penultimate stress count. The melody of the word is “DUN DUN dada”. High high low low; quarter note quarter note eighth eighth, the “a” in “-are” is barely heard.

Etymologically it means “cabbage soup slurpers”, but it uses fossilized sublexemes so to modern ears it sounds like “cabbage boozers”. Supa went from “eating soup” to “taking careful sips” to “drinking unlimited amounts of alcohol recklessly”.

Wiktionary warns that the entire expression “lika goda kålsupare”, (for plural, or “lika god kålsupare” singular) is fossilized and is the only valid form but never mind that crusty warning, I (Swedish L1) use just the head noun “kålsupare” on it’s own and it gets the message across just fine, as does the adjective form “kålsupande”.

The expression started out as something similar in meaning to “enh he puts his pants on one leg at a time like anyone else”. “They eat their cabbage soup in a similar fashion to each other”; but quickly came to connote hypocrisy or equal blame and that’s what it has meant for centuries. It was used by anticapitalists to condemn tankies in the fifties; also using the head noun without the phrase so it’s not like I’m blazing new linguistic ground here.

What do the little dots and rings over letters mean?

Misapplied, it can be a tu quoque fallacy or send people lost in some sorta “horseshoe theory” bull, so be careful.

Ewok writes in, saying:

It’s pot that calls the kettle black

Right! I might’ve used “black-kettle-caller” in English except black is beautiful so the connotations get a li’l confusing. Not that cabbage soup can’t be delish with a li’l bit of kampot and tamari.