Íslenzka.net ~ An Icelandic Journey

Reykjavík mayor Jón Gnarr announced today that he won’t seek reelection, which will bring to an end one of the more colorful political careers in recent memory 🙂 I first became familiar with him through his character Georg Bjarnfreðarson in the Icelandic TV series Næturvaktin, which I watched (with subtitles) when I was getting started learning Icelandic. As far as I can tell, he’s done a decent job as mayor considering he’s really a comedian, which is part of the reason he gave for his deciding not to run again.

In this story on Vísir about his decision, there are a couple interesting phrases, particularly two involving the word kostur. I’ll just pull out the relevant parts of the article for illustration, but first an expression with eftirsjá from the opening paragraph:

„Það verður gríðarleg eftirsjá að Jóni úr borgarpólitíkinni,“ segir Dagur B. Eggertsson, formaður borgarráðs og borgarfulltrúi Samfylkingarinnar.

“Jón will be sorely missed in city politics,” says Dagur B. Eggertsson, city council head and representative of the Social Democrats.

The dictionary example gives það er mikil eftirsjá að + dative as meaning something will be missed.

…

Moving on to the versatile kostur:

Jón Gnarr Borgarstjóri tilkynnti í morgun að hann ætlaði ekki að gefa kost á sér aftur sem borgarstjóri í Reykjavík.

Mayor Jon Gnarr announced this morning that he will not run for reelection as mayor of Reykjavik.

Here the expression gefa kost á sér appears, which means to offer oneself as a candidate for something.

Þá segir hann að honum finnist leiðinlegt að eiga ekki kost á að starfa frekar með Jóni á næsta kjörtímabili.

He [Dagur B. Eggertsson] went on to say how sad he was that he wouldn’t have the opportunity to work with Jón during the upcoming election.

Another phrase with kostur – eiga kost á – to have the chance to do something.

There are several other phrases with kostur, check them out!