[marginalia_nu]

Both are non-mandatory, but the first carries the connotation that this is something the government thinks you should be doing, but the latter is more like a suggestion of something cool you may want to do, like visit the Vasa museum next time you're in Stockholm.

Yes, they are both voluntary, but the nuance is quite different. That ambiguity in nuance is a problem, given that "recommendation" is the strongest wording for a non-legal mandate the Swedish government will use.

[denton-scratch]

> but the first carries the connotation that this is something the government thinks you should be doing

Unfortunately that distinction was deliberately obfuscated by the UK Government during the COVID crisis. They would issue "guidelines" that you could be arrested for violating. As I recall, they began as real guidelines, and morphed into legal mandates without ever becoming laws.

[ohbtvz]

If I understand you correctly, the issue is that the Swedish government used jargon masquerading as a common word, and as a result people didn't understand the meaning. That's another example of jargon being a problem!

[marginalia_nu]

Yeah. The deeper problem is that the government needs more precision than common words offer.

Just as programmers invented programming languages to unambiguously express an idea, the legal system uses legal jargon to unambiguously express an idea. Getting rid of jargon means you need to express specific meanings some other way. The Swedish government chose overloading specific meanings to ambiguous words, which is really strictly worse than legal jargon.