Watching Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the frequent use of the Swedish word hot meaning “threat” jumped out and lead to this question. Since hotmail in Swedish literally means “threat(s) e-mail”, I wonder if hotmail.com is as commonly used as an e-mail address in Sweden as it is elsewhere, due to the negative connotation?
No negative connotation. A swede would pronounce the “hotmail” email service as a single word, in English.
I’d venture to guess the average Swede would score higher on the English part of the SAT than the average American, so, no problem.
The answer is no. Hotmail was widely used up here back in the day, and presumably still is.
No one I know ever made the connection between the “hot” in “Hotmail” and the Swedish word for “threat”. They’re pronounced differently, for starters.
A literal translation of “Hotmail” into Swedish would be “Hetbrev”, which sounds nonsensical, silly and/or vaguely old-timey pornographic – think 18th century quill pen sexting by way of Carl Michael Bellman, or what have you.
A threatening letter is called a “hotbrev.”
That statement is somewhat true today, but “mail” meaning “e-mail”, although common today, is a (of course) extremely recent loan to the Scandinavian languages, so from the beginning hotmail was easily identifiable as an English word.
That said, “hotmejl” (with the Swedified spelling of mail) gives 172 000 hits on google with at least a third of the first two pages being references to email threats, and searching for phrases such as “skickar hotmail” (sends email threat), turns up at least a few refering to email threats rather than using Microsoft webmail.