En vän i handen är bättre än tio i skogen!

“A friend in hand is worth two in the bush!”. Ooooooookkk. In the bush or in the woods? And is this something Swedes would say? Or just someone’s attempt at a little smutsigt skämt?

Cf. “En fågel i handen är bättre än tio i skogen”.

I’d seen the bird one before - but wondered if the friend one was meant to be a joke…

English Translation

A friend in hand is worth two in the bush!

PS - don’t know why i didn’t notice this before - tio is 10 so how does it become “2 in the bush” ? This one is frying my noggin!

Thinking in binary? :wink:

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This one could keep me awake at night!! Is binary code for Swedes practicing a little mental torture??

The original sentence (in English) is marked “parody”. It’s only natural that the Swedish translation carries over the numbers from the traditional Swedish proverb. For comparison, Finnish uses ten and Spanish uses a hundred.

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It is meant as a joke (but not the sexual kind of joke you seem to have in mind).

Someone answered to “A real friend is like a rare bird” with the joke (intentionally misinterpreting the point of that sentence) that both are watched by strangers hiding in the bushes.

https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences/show/507744#comment-24622

Which triggered the (supposedly amusing) word play on the original idiom:

That’s all there’s to it. Nothing sexual going on here.

A joke that needs an explanation (and/or additional context, as in this case) isn’t that funny. And since Clozemaster users don’t have that context, I find this sentence more confusing than funny.

I myself am going to add this sentence to my list of ignored sentences.