Fangst

The coinage "fangst," referring to Twilight's genre of emo teen-girl vampire stuff, turns out to already be the name of a delightful and diaphanous hanging storage unit from Ikea.

• [thehoundoflove]

  Plus this condom is full of holes, so there will be even more little Fangsties running around…

• [Anonymous]

  Are those… bite marks on the condom?
  I’m confused.

• [arkizzle / Moderator]

  Swiss condom.

• [Anonymous]

  Just thought I’d mention that in Norwegian and Swedish, “fangst” simply means “the catch”, as in fishing and hunting.

• [endymion]

  I love the term “fangst” for teenage vampire angst, and hope that it catches on. Meanwhile, it hasn’t. A google search on “fangst” returns Norwegian/Ikea stuff for the first five hits. The sixth hit? This boingboing entry.

• [The Chemist]

  “Holey Green Condoms Batman! That prophylactic looks defective!”

  “Shut up and bend over.”

• [oasisob1]

  Ankast: Angst over the loss of Paul Anka?
  Bangst: Bad haircut angst?
  Dangst: Angst over having to put 25 cents in the swear jar?
  I have to go to work, so I don’t have time to think of more, maybe you can..

• [jere7my]

  Is fangst better or worse than ankhst (the ennui that overtakes fans of Neil Gaiman’s Death)?

• [Anonymous]

  “emo teen-girl vampire stuff” & that pic.

  Is it just me or others also noticed something kinky about it.

• [Angstrom]

  Did everyone know that Cybergoths, those goths who wear day-glo and go to raves, are also known as ‘Gravers’.

  I love that. Possibly even more than I love the idea of dayglo goths.

• [LB]

  I have one of these. It’s okay unless you put too much crap in it, upon which it warps.

• [Kibble]

  I have something like that except it’s for cats. They can climb up and down the levels and hang out. My cats love it, or at least they used to. I haven’t seen either of them in it recently.

  • [IWood]

    Either your cats are reeeeally small your you have reeeeally big feet.

• [GeekMan]

  I have two of these: one in the bedroom and one in the bathroom. Awesome quick-access storage!

• [Anonymous]

  Another pronounciation example. I have heard some native English speakers pronounce the word “thought” with a similar vowel. Not perfect resemblence, but pretty good considering that even the least vowel rich Swedish dialects have something like 15+ vowel phonemes and most dialects have something like 30+, topped with important differences in tonality (not used that much in “TV-Swedish” and in no way represented in written Swedish), intonation, stress et.c. making up hundreds of information bearing vowel sounds, whereas most English dialect have only 13 vowels and are completely monotone.

  In many dialects the base word fÃ¥nga (to catch) is still used with different phonemes depending on case (don’t know what this is called in English, but you have a similar, but more simplistic, “sound-grammar” in words like catch, caught, caught) it can be pronounsed -fang-, -fäng- (ae), -fÃ¥ng- (au), -fong-(short o). So the kinship to German fangen is indeed very obvious in those Swedish dialects. The German word der Fang is in Swedish used in tÃ¥ng/tänger (tong/tongs) and Swedish tand/tänder (teeth/teeths). The “f” from the old Germanic roots has become a “t” in Swedish, the other differences is traces of old obsolete grammar. The similarities in English words is because those steam from either Old Germanic, Old Norse or both (the word was already present in the Brittish Islands but its use and pronounciation was affected by Old Norse or Norman).

  The English word angst is Ã¥ngest in Swedish (pronounces something like “oung-est”). Pretty obvious similarity isn’t it. Although present in most Germanic languages, I guess English “angst” is an loan word from Old Norse (Old Norse in Swedish is called fornnordiska (ancient nordic language, before the 9th century) or runsvenska (Runic Swedish, from the 9th century until 1225)). Swedish is an direct decendant from Old Norse, altough with a very germanified and francofied grammar (but we use latin grammar with most latin loan words).

• [iamrachel]

  During my time as an art student, a few friends of mine used to call people with “fake angst” fangsters. (Y’know, art students who acted edgy and mad at the world because they thought that was how artists are supposed to act.)

• [Linkowich]

  Well, the name of the storage thingy is not really FANGST – but rather FÃ…NGST with that ringed A (meaning “a catch”, probably playing on its similarities with some kind of fishing contraption).

  Thus, the Swedish pronounciation is closer to “FONGST” (no angst in sight). And yes, IKEA is Swedish (as in Sweden) not Swiss (as in Switzerland), nor Norwegian.

  • [arkizzle / Moderator]

    Linkowich,

    You missed my Swiss cheese joke, and turned it into an accusation of geographical ignorance? For shame.

    http://janeheller.mlblogs.com/swiss.cheese.jpg

  • [Santa’s Knee]

    Thank you, Ric Romero…

  • [jere7my]

    Linkowich, “angst” is also pronounced [ongst]. It’s German.

    • [djn]

      @jere7my:
      The German, Norwegian and Swedish “A” are fairly close, and don’t really overlap with “Ã…”. A good approximation of the latter is the vowel in “maw”, BBC-style; not unlike how the Germans pronounce “O”.

      Or, if that happens to be an easier comparison: The Scandinavian “A” resembles the Japanese one, and “Ã…” is somewhere in the vicinity of their “O”.

      All that said, I agree with peterbruells: It’s an excellent multilevel pun.

  • [peterbruells]

    @linkwitch Considering that in German “fangen” means “to catch” (prey by angling, hunting or by hand, like a ball), the noun “Der Fang” means a) the catch, b) the act and c) the teeth (Usually plural Fänge, though) and that Ã¥ is a long a, I very much assume that the wordplay is based on the same root and thus very appropriate.

• [dnkn]

  The letter Ã¥ in swedish is pronounced the same way the french pronounce “au”. It’s the same sound as the a in ball.

• [tw15]

  One is slightly flimsy, full of holes, cheap and throw-away. For most of the time, it’s the bathroom.

  The other is a plastic storage bag.

• [Anonymous]

  No, that’s “fÃ¥ngst” (meaning the noun “catch”), with an “Ã¥”. That’s a completely different letter. It’s not an “a” with a funny circle any more than a “b” is an “l” with a funny circle.

  • [dculberson]

    Yeah, it’s totally different, doesn’t look at all the same.

    Oh wait! Yes it does!

  • [Clay]

    Tŕŭę, bůŧ ŷøŭ şţîłl rëåđ tĥĭš àŝ Ėñğłíśħ, ŗıĝĥŧ?