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The Reykjavík Grapevine Archives
The Grapevine’s guide to sounding Icelandic, one word at a time
Some international political commentators have voiced the opinion that the strikes on Iran by the United States and Israel are a case of “wag the dog.” The “wag the dog” idiom serves as a title of a famous movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. The movie’s plot has the president of the United States get caught for making advances on an underage girl in the Oval Office weeks before an election. To take the public’s attention away from the scandal, the administration conjures up a fake war with the nation of Albania to refocus media attention. The movie premiered weeks before news broke about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in the late 1990s.
The Iran strikes might be viewed as a diversion from the current scandal, the Epstein Files, which feature aforementioned Bill Clinton, but also — importantly — current incumbent Donald Trump. The Epstein Files lay bare the perverted conduct of multiple powerful men and women.
This leads us to the Icelandic word for pervert, which is öfuguggi. A word that directly translates as a reversed fin (of a fish). For some reason, Icelanders of yore could think of nothing as perverse as a fish with its fins reversed, aside, of course, from horses with their hooves reversed. That however, relates to a very disturbing series of folklore tales of so-called nykur, demonic animals that look exactly like horses, but have their hooves reversed, and, if ridden by humans, will drag those humans with them into the nearest pond, and drown them.
Öfuguggar were also, according to Icelandic folklore, believed to inhabit dark ponds and to be dangerous. Shedding light on the dark pond that is the perverse doings of some of the world’s most powerful people is the release of the Epstein Files. Whether the theory that the Iran strikes are simply a deliberate method of White House spin doctors to move the media’s focus away from those files remains to be seen.
Learn more Icelandic words hér.
