English is an imperial langauge❢ Why? one could ask.
My main theory is due to lack of a corresponding word for the Swedish word “lagom”.
Lagom lacks any English translation but here is an attempt:
Lagom=”sufficiently much to be enough for everyone in a fair way”.
Even in Swedish the word “lagom” has become less understood latetely and you can see funny attempts to explain the word, which could possibly be due to so much influence from English, where this word is not known.
Lagom simply means “lag om” that is “the team around”.
Occasionally I wonder how English spoken parents tell their kids to not take too much cake when they are missing the word “lagom”?
–Wow, cake❣ 😛
— Please remember to take lagom much❣ 😉
(which implicitly means if you take too large piece on your own, someone may not get any cake and you may even get pain in your stomach, so both you and the one who didn’t get any cake will become unhappy)
Apart from that English imports a lot of words from other languages like e.g. “ombudsman” and “smorgasbord” from Swedish, however in some cases it seems as the word may get a confusing meaning, take such a word as “liberty”, which in the imperial English seems to have been misunderstood, at least by some, to also include the freedom to limit other peoples’ freedom, where the actual meaning of liberty is:
Liberty = each and everyone get sufficiently much freedom so it is enough for everyone to express their individuality in a fair way without limiting or restricting anyone elses’ freedom.
Regarding cake, there have been developed many theories on how to cut a cake in a fair way, like described in this paper by Brams, Jones and Klamler (political science, mathematics and economics) and also temporal fairness, a 100 year old method is here described in a popular way, and here in a video presented by the mathematician Alex Bellow,
but…, maybe certain cakes should not be cut at all…?
PS. remember that it’s Earth’s Day, everyday❣