#snicksnack

Sakura doesn’t notice at first -- no one notices at first. It’s easy not to notice, at first. She has a good skin care routine -- which she’s yelled about loudly enough that most people are familiar with it -- and she’s always looked young for her age. People start to notice when it’s obvious that Ino -- someone whose skin care routine is even more in depth than Sakura’s, which they are, again, aware of via yelling -- looks older than her. But there’s an easy explanation for that -- after all, wasn’t Sakura’s teacher known for her youthful henge? So people roll their eyes but they don’t comment where Sakura can hear them, and she doesn’t notice anything different -- because there isn’t anything different for her to notice. Quite literally.

Like in Swedish “fjäll” refers to mountains above the tree line, exclusively in the Nordic countries. It’s not that that’s the name of our mountain range, it’s just what we call mountains here. I can’t say that I’m going to the Italian “fjällen” because they do not exist. I’d have to say “berg” which is a more general word for mountain (which can also be used for Nordic mountains of course, although “fjällen” is way more common and also gives a very different picture in my opinion). Another example would be “älv” (big river) and, interestingly according to the dictionary of the Swedish Academy, a similar but not exactly equivalent feature, “flod”, has the usage note “mainly describing a feature abroad”. Personally I had never thought of this and to me there could be a “flod” in Sweden but not an “älv” abroad.

What fascinates me about this is that these are in no way features unique to here. Like how you’d think a “fjord” has a specific name because it’s so common in Norway and so uncommon elsewhere. Both “fjäll” and “älvar” are extremely common everywhere so why are they only used for our “fjäll” and “älvar”?