i did read the very short page, but still, not being a swede, i suppose i just don't get it.
“Att tiga” means to keep quiet. One would say “Han/hon tiger” to mean “He/she is keeping quiet”. The word “tiger” in Swedish is also how they say the animal. That’s why it has a double meaning.
It’s literally the first sentence of the second paragraph on the page.
> In Swedish, the word svensk can mean both the adjective "Swedish" and the noun "Swede" while tiger can mean either the noun for the animal or the present tense of the verb tiga ("to keep silent", or more colloquially to "keep one's mouth shut"), giving the poster the double meaning "a Swedish tiger" or "a Swede keeps silent".
this might be lost on me because no such wordplay exists in any language i am familiar with.
A potential (contrived) example in English would be to use the notion of a strike in baseball as a covert communication for a worker strike. I could imagine signs and stickers made with an umpire making the strike hand gesture.
That's not completely contradictory, but maybe a self defense guide might use that imagery for instructing someone to strike an assailant. And there, a strike in baseball is literally missing the ball, or failing to strike the ball. So very opposite.
i was thinking back in wwii, if they had a "hush puppies" campaign in lieu of loose lips etc. - it probably would have been mis-processed in my mind as well. puppies = yapping. any other message would be swamped by the puppy noise.
my mind goes to the tangible, physical and spatial first, and the abstract/symbolic second.