broom-buoy

Stormigt hav. Ruskprick (August Strindberg, 1892)

[Image source: https://www.europeana.eu/portal/sv/explore/people/60469-august-strindberg.html ]

Today's unusual Swedish word. I was looking up kvast (which means broom) in my battered dictionary (Esselte Studium, 1983), and my eye fell on kvastprick : buoy (beacon) with broom . Hmm...

Well, here's one, in a stormy Strindberg seascape. As you can see, it's a kind of primitive buoy where the visible part looks like a broom. They were painted red. Maybe the most literal translation would be a "broom-marker". Prick means mark, spot, dot, speck; also a bull's-eye, and (in sport) a penalty point.

This kind of buoy was also called ruskprick, as in the title of Strindberg's painting. (Ruska means a bunch of twigs.)

Here's a wintry photo of one, by the photographer Gustaf Wilhelm Reimers (1885 - 1963).

[Image source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/021016877561/pa-som-ruskprick ]

These simple kvastprickar are anchored, not solidly fixed into the underwater rock. That's about the only thing I can understand about the diagram below (mariners may do better). It comes from the Svenska kalendern  for 1926  -- evidently a sort of annual of useful (or useless) information, like the Dunlop Book of Facts I used to leaf through as a child.

[Image source: http://runeberg.org/svenskaka/1926/0077.html ]