On "Cronkiters" and "Kronkiters"
It was widely reported in Walter Cronkite's obituaries that "Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters." Or by some accounts it's the Swedes who use "Cronkiters." This too-good-to-check linguafactoid came up in the comments on my post "Walter Leland Mr. Cronkite," and commenter Lugubert swiftly dismissed the Swedish claim:
Google "cronkiter" and you'll find all hits are in English. Smells of myth. I, Swede, 66, multilingual professional translator, have never seen or heard that word in any language. I'm afraid (read: convinced) that Mr. C is totally unknown by an overwhelming majority of Swedes.
If, never the less, a similar word would have been adopted into Swedish by the cognoscenti, I'm at least fairly sure that the for Swedish very odd -er would immediately have been replaced by a more normal nomen agentis ending like -erare.
There's no reason to believe the Dutch part of the story, either. Read all about it in my latest Word Routes column on the Visual Thesaurus.