Little rowdy

Ahhh, the wonders of the Internet.

I was thinking about my dad's mom, my grandma Carrie, the other day. She has been gone for several years now. I remember her as this little white-haired lady who baked awesome buns, had a perpetual smile on her face and talked to the critters on the farm in Swedish.

I never really understood what she was saying, but she'd call the dog -- and this is my best guess at a phonetic spelling: Lil-A BOO-sa -- which I always thought meant "little mutt" because that's what we always had around the farm: Mutts.

But for some reason, I just decided that I was going to find out for sure. I get these ideas in my head sometimes, and I just keep going until I figure it out. (I did want to be a detective at one point when I was a kid.)

Well, that's when I found this wonderful little Google tool called Google Translate. At first I typed in the word "lila boosa" thinking the way I remember her saying it might be the way it is spelled. Turned out that meant purple boos. So then I tried "lila buss." That got me "purple bus." So I  was just going to take off the "s" and put an "a" when it said at the bottom "Did you mean lilla bus?"

So I clicked on it. And adding that "l" changed the word from "purple" to "little."

I was half-way there!

So I added an "a" to "bus" and up came the translation, "little mischief." When I changed the "a" to an "e" the meaning came up as "little rowdy." The "a" version and the "e" version of buse/busa sounded about the same to me when I listened to what it would sound like in Swedish.

In fact, when I listened to the Swedish pronunciation, it made me a little sad, because it reminded me so much of my grandma. But it also brought a smile to my face. Because here all this time, my grandma Carrie was calling the dog "little mischief" or "little rowdy."

That has so much more character than "little mutt" and really fits what I remember of my grandma's personality much better.

We have a "lilla busa" at our house and I think from now on in Grandma Carrie's honor, that's the Springer's second name!

Dawn