Let’s pretend for a moment, for the sake of a nifty segue and the argument that follows it, that Eskimos do indeed have many precise words for snow because they are steeped in it — literally.

By the same token, then, it must mean something that the Swedish language has many more precise words for defining family relationships than does English. I’ve only just now realized this, because I myself have always been tone deaf when it comes to such words. This is something that I blame on my Dutch, by the way: That language is even less precise than English on this matter, since both nephews/nieces and cousins are called neven/nichten [Dutch].

In Swedish, the exact term for nephew/niece depends not just on the sex of the person in question, but also on the sex of the parent related to you. So the son of your brother is brorson, that of your sister systerson — and then there is brorsdotter and systerdotter for any nieces you might have.

This same logic applies to grandparents. With far meaning father and mor meaning mother, the four possible combinations are farfar, mormor, farmor and morfar. Unfortunately, this is farmor complicated than I can handle because I can never remember if the first bit begets the second or vice versaIt turns out the second bit begets the first.. But it gets farfar worse: Great grandparents also have precise definitions: quickly now, there’s farfars far, farfars mor, farmors far, farmors mor, morfars far, morfars mor, mormors far, and finally, mormors mor, who recently was eulogized in this Kylie Minogue song (iTunes URL). Do you even know the names of any of your great grandparents?

Some Swedish words are too good to be kept by Swedes all to themselves and should be adopted by anglophiles immediately. In English, for example, “stepmother” is far too monolithic a notion: Swedes understand there can be bad, neutral and good step parents, and have dignified each with a proper term. There is styvmor, the kind that Cinderella had; plastmamma — literally, plastic mother — which is neutral; and finally, the wonderful bonusmamma, which means exactly what you think it does.

Now, why do the Swedes have so many words for relatives? Because they are dysfunctional socialists intent on banishing the family? Or because family is so important that each relationship is lovingly given due recognition? Or maybe because it facilitates keeping track of the score in Strindbergian family feuds? My guess is that the truth lies somewhere between options two and three.

Discovered via the “Oddly Enough” section of Yahoo! news: A wallet lost by an 18-year old girl in southern Sweden 40 years ago has just been returned anonymously via the post, with everything in it intact.

Here is the original story [Swedish] from a local paper, with picture. Here is the BBC’s take, in English.

The story has intrigued a lot of news editors: The Reuters version has been picked up globally by at least 60 papers and news sites monitored by Google.

Why? Tritely, because it is an unusual occurence. A better reason might be that such stories resonate in us. We like to be assured that such occurences happen, if only occasionally. We like the idea that individuals make efforts on behalf of strangers, because it is a token of humanity’s ability to empathize. More broadly, we need to believe that we can sometimes trump the random small cruelties of daily life. And we like to fantasize that out there, the things we’ve lost continue to have a life of their own, perhaps one day to be reunited with us.

Finally, the story resonates because we are curious; because the return of the wallet must have a larger plotMy own theory: Like Aristides Silk, the kleptomanic pickpocket in Tintin’s The Secret of the Unicorn, somebody has been collecting wallets in Southern Sweden. That person has just died, and his widow is now disbanding the collection.. Is it a story of shame, or of benevolence? Did the anonymous mailer know the wallet’s owner? Good fiction tends to start this way — the wallet was returned to the town of Trelleborg, which is not far from where Henning Mankell‘s Kurt Wallander works; he’d discover a huge conspiracy involving stolen identities, human trafficking, and sex slavery.

Trelleborg is also not so far from Hässleholm, where the letter was written. That story, too, has not yet reached its end.

Stockholm is being overrun with small children. Everyone’s getting them. This is a wonderful thing, but where do they come from? How do Stockholmers proceed from single to parent? There are plenty of either kind around, but what is missing from view is a clear dynamic for progressing from the former state to the latter. There is no visible culture of wooing here; the actual process of couple formation must occur well out of the public eye.

What is propelling this baby boom? What is this black box into which you drop singles and out of which march families? After extensive research, I’ve constructed a working, falsifiable theory: The black box is binge drinking.

Binge drinking is on the rise in SwedenInfo on alcohol consumption is culled from the European Comparative Alcohol Study, published in 2001, produced as part of the Swedish presidency of the EU.. Swedes still do not drink as much as the average European, but they do drink it all at once, on weekends. This is a clever bit of adaptation: It allows for bacchic pursuits that do not compromise weekday contributions to GDP. It’s an entirely rational and considerate solution to to the problem of being rational and considerate and also horny.

Here is how I believe Swedes procreate, based on my research:

Let’s start on a typical Friday, at 5.45pm, 15 minutes before the Systembolaget at Skanstull in Stockholm is set to closeSystembolaget is the state alcohol dispensing monopoly run by the prime minister’s wife.: How to know when binge drinking is imminent? There is a queue for the machine that dispenses numbered tickets for the queue. Hundreds of people crowd in and await their turn. At 6pm sharp, policemen guard the doors against insistent latecomers. All purchased booze is hauled home, where it is consumed before heading out for the evening. The idea is to get drunk before going out because drinking anything remotely alcoholic at a bar is even more expensive.

Once at the bar, the buzz is maintained by buying “cheap” beer in copious quantities. Loose groups of mixed-sex friends sit around, eyeing each other up while clearly signaling they are drunk and hence to be absolved of any negative consequences subsequent actions might haveThere is little doubt that for Swedes, inebriation correlates strongly with sex. They even have a word for children born 9 months after midsummer’s carousing: midsommarbarn [Swedish, but with interesting birth statistics]..

Actual expressions of interest are managed by a process of attrition. As groups head home, those people with a mutual interest in one another contrive to be the last to remain as the pack splits up. Typically, then, moves are attempted in the pit of night at deserted busstops, subway platforms, and entranceways.

If it doesn’t work out, then both sides claim drunkeness. But if it does, the couple formation process accelerates rapidly. The pair, relieved at their gambit having worked, quickly opt out of what, frankly, amounted to a low-probability weekly crap shoot. Before long, larger economic forces come into play: Sharing an apartment is cheaper, but then you might as well get some perks from the state for doing so, and so you sambo.

This is how I think it happens. The remaining bit about how the children arrive should be self evident. One way to test this theory is to see if there is a correlation between binge drinking levels and birth rates, with birth rates hopefully lagging binge drinking levels by a year or two.

One question future researchers may want to look into is whether binge drinking is also an economic adaptation to the high price of alcohol. If it is expensive to get drunk enough to lose your inhibitions, you will tend to save up your resources for less frequent but more effective bouts. If this is indeed the case, we should see a less pronounced culture of binge drinking in Malmö, a city where the Systembolaget monopoly holds less sway on account of that city’s proximity to Denmark and its lakes of cheap booze. Eventual effects on the birth rate may be more difficult to tease out, however: Restricting one’s alcohol-fueled romantic pursuits to weekends may be a clever way of managing scarcity, but it should be a tactic jetissoned in times of plenty, in favor of a more sustained effort. Increasing the frequency of low-probability crap shoots is definitely an effective way of raising one’s chances as the price of alcohol drops. In Malmö, then, the disappearance of binge drinking may be a leading indicator of increasing birth rates.

Policy implications are clear: If the Swedish government chooses to keep alcohol prices high, binge drinking should be encouraged as a means of maximising birth rates; but a better policy may be to let prices fall, so as to generate increased opportunities for mating. There may be far more Swedes on the way.