Earlier today I was writing on our company blog: www.watsonlangauge.se about the English idioms, it's raining cats and dogs and brass monkeys.
Now for a Swedish idiom!
One often hears Swedes saying: Ingen fara på taket. Literally translated it means: no danger on the roof. How it is actually used is to mean: No harm done.
This winter I suspect I've actually got to understand what it means, as ironically nothing could be further from the truth, there have been several fatal accidents. Roofs have collpased under the enormous weight of snow upon them or large lumps of snow and ice have fallen down killing and injuring people.
Just look at the photo above of the icicles hanging from Ulrika's brother Thomas's house and you can see how this can happen. Those babies are twice as long as Kai.
There seems to be another expression: Ingen ko på isen (no cow on the frozen lake), with much the same meaning.
But Ulrika's a farmer's daughter and she's never heard it, so I'm sticking to dangerous rooftops!
Hej,
SvaraRadera"ingen ko på isen", that expression I use all the time. I´m a "countrygirl?". It means "there´s no danger", "no need to hurry".
"Ingen fara på taket", I would say it means pretty much the same thing as the above, as an addition to "no harm done".
Me and Ingvar have spent some hours last week to shovel down some tons of snow from our farmhouse roof. There was about 1 meter of snow on one side of the roof, due to "unfortunate wind conditions in connection with a heavy snowfall".
I was scared to death all the time, it was very icy on the roof whenever I by mistake trod on the tin roof instead of in the snow on the roof. In the end Ingvar used the roof as a big slide down into big heeps of snow.
Hälsningar Margareta