Name: Sweden.
Age: First settled roughly 10,000 years ago.
Appearance: Definitely real.
I love Sweden so much. Me too.
The clean air. The small population. Niagara Falls just over an hour’s drive away. I love all 34 sq miles of Sweden. Wait, you are talking about Sweden, right?
Of course I’m talking about Sweden. The only Sweden in the world, in upstate New York. No, I mean the other Sweden. The famous one. The large northern European country.
There’s another Sweden? That’s crazy. Yes, of course there is. Your Sweden was named after my Sweden. In fact, there are eight places named Sweden around the world.
Someone should trademark the name Sweden to put a stop to all this confusion. Someone is.
Good. Who? Sweden.
Your Sweden or my Sweden? Sweden Sweden! Sweden has become the first country to apply to trademark its name with the European Union Intellectual Property Office, in an attempt to prove that it is the original and best Sweden.
Why? Because they’re worried that people will book a holiday to Sweden and get on a plane and accidentally end up in the wrong Sweden. As the Swedish tourism board says, this move “aims to ensure no one packs for the Swedish lakes and forests only to find themselves in a far-off town with the same name but none of the Scandi charm”.
Oh, so this is all just some half-baked attempt to drum up publicity for Swedish tourism. Well, yes, obviously, but it’s still a good idea. I once tried to catch a train from London to Ashford and ended up in a nightmare Ashford miles from my destination.
Which is the nightmare Ashford, the one in Kent or the one in Middlesex? There is no way to publicly disclose this without offending several thousand people. I also once went to the wrong Lille. I went to the one in Belgium, when I meant to go to the Lille in France.
That happens to football fans sometimes. I’ll be more careful what I type into my satnav. Anyway, this could be a landmark trademark. After all, where Sweden goes, other countries may follow.
Which ones? Well, there are 15 towns in the US called Norway and 28 places around the world named London. Estonia could seek a trademark to prevent people from confusing it with the asteroid 1541 Estonia.
Now I really want to go to Sweden. The one in New York? God, me too. It sounds definitively amazing.
Do say: “Visit Sweden.”
Don’t say: “Not that Sweden you idiot, the other Sweden!”
