Word Of The Issue: Flugdólgur

Until 1989, beer was illegal in Iceland. However, there was one place where beer was legal—the international airport in Keflavík. There, drunks entered an exotic beer-filled purgatory, where all their worries could be drowned before soaring up into the skies. Imagine boarding a plane not in an orderly boring queue, but as you would roll into a bar at three in the morning. And as the drunks got rowdy, rude and started fighting each other, a new word was born: ‘flugdólgur.’ Directly translated it means “flight pimp,” but the translation “flight hooligan” is perhaps more fitting. “Drunks on a plane,” basically.