Confusing Cognates

Humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. I have read somewhere that it takes the average human 21 days to adjust and adapt to a new situation. I have now been in Sweden for almost a month. This 21-day adjustment period seems to be true. A few days ago I realized that I had become used to not understanding what people around me were saying. I didn’t feel shut out of conversation, rather it seemed as though I had always been out side of the conversation . However, getting used to something doesn’t make it necessary easy. The language barrier isn’t overly problematic until it comes to the purchasing of groceries. It is rather hard to ask an inanimate object such as a block of cheese what exactly it is in English. Also, all the cooking instructions are naturally in Swedish. This makes following directions especially interesting. The following story illustrates the perilous world of grocery shopping in a forging country.
The canola oil story:
Everyone knows what canola oil is - its cooking oil. There isn’t a grocery store in America that doesn’t sell it. Therefore, every grocery store in Sweden should sell it, right? A fellow American exchange student relayed this story to me. When he arrived in Östersund he went on his first trip to the grocery store. He spoke no Swedish. He found the milk, eggs, and cheese; these items, although labeled in Swedish, were pretty self-explanatory. He had everything he needed to make his first meal in Sweden. The only missing ingredient was oil, but not just any oil. He wanted canola oil. He searched the whole store; he found what he assumed to be olive oil (judging by the picture of an olive tree on the label), sesame seed oil, and rap olja, but no canola oil. Like any lost person he decided to ask a store employee. Is his most apologetic English he asked where he might find the canola oil. The employee looked shocked and responded, “What is this canola oil you wish to find?” The student tried to explain, “You know, you use it for cooking. It’s called canola oil.” (As many people do when they don’t know how to explain a simple object, he simply named it again, as if saying it again would perhaps explain the oil better.) . The confused employee called over another employee and explained in Swedish that this person was looking for canola oil. Both the employees looked shocked and embarrassed every time they had to say the word canola. After a few moments of contemplation both employees suggested that perhaps rap olja would work for his cooking purposes rather than canola oil. He obliged and bought rap olja instead. Later, when he returned to his apartment, he told the story to one of his Swedish flat-mates. The flat-mate started to giggle, then laugh. The American student was confused as to why his search for canola oil was so riotously. When the Swedish student’s laughter subsided and he could talk normally he explained to the American, “You have been asking for sex oil! Fuck oil, to be exact. Canola means fuck in Swedish.”
After hearing this story I decided to do some research on the subject of both canola oil and the word that it is easily confused with. The accurate Swedish word is “knulla.” The entry for "knulla" in the online dictionary lexin (http://lexin.nada.kth.se/cgi-bin/swe-eng) is stated as the following:
knullar [²kn'ul:ar] knullade knullat knulla(!)
ha samlag (may be taken as offensive)
A knullar (med) B; A och B knullar
English translation: fuck

The reason why rapeseed oil is not to be found in the United States is slightly more interesting then one might expect. According to Wikipedia, “Canola is a type of edible oil initially bred in Canada by Keith Downey and Baldur Stefansson in the 1970s. It is a trademarked quality description of a group of cultivars of rapeseed variants from which low erucic acid rapeseed oil and low glucosinolate meal are obtained. The word ‘canola’ was derived from ‘Canadian oil, low acid’ in 1978.” I have been told, but have not confirmed the truth, that at one point canola oil was called rapeseed oil in the states, however, no one would buy it because of the negative connotation associated with the word “rape”. As a result, the name was quickly changed to canola oil.