Polar Bear Pitching - Ending Death by PowerPoint

Let’s face it, we have all been on the receiving end of overly long and boring pitches and presentations, delivered by someone with the charisma of a sloth on Valium.

But help may be at hand for us poor victims. And it comes from Finland.

10 Useless Facts about Finland

In the past couple of weeks, my social media inlets [is that the word for the SoMe equivalent of an inbox?] seem to have been filled with an unusually high number of, well, numbered lists. You know the kind that go: "5, 10 or 20 [useless] things you need to know, do, avoid, see, read or have, now or before you die".

I figured it was time for me to contribute a trivial and pointless list of my own – about Finnish things, obviously.

Language Oddity #4: No Future in Finland's Dreaming

It might be unfair to say that that Finns are pessimists, but they definitely don't believe in the future.

Future tense that is.

Language Oddity #3 (Update)

In a previous post, I mentioned how Finns don't have the verb "to have", and instead use a convoluted construction to get around that problem.

In my rush though, I over-simplified things! Silly me, this is about the Finnish language after all!

Language Oddity #3: To Have Or Have Not

French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon claimed “property is theft” (“la propriété, c'est le vol!”). It seems the Finns agree, as they have no property. In fact they have nothing, because there is no such verb as “to have” in Finnish!

Language Oddity #2: Polar Questions

It can be difficult to work out whether a Finn is asking a question, because they do not inflect their tone upwards at the end of interrogative sentences. Instead, the Finns have developed an ingenious trick to give a subtle clue to those-in-the-know that they are asking a question.

Language Oddity #1: Negative Sentences

One of the first things I was taught in Finnish was how to conjugate verbs in the present tense. It seemed easy, but then came the twist!