"Niksen" is the new "Hygge" 🛌, When is "next weekend"? 📅, Translating "deugpolitie" 👮♀️
Welcome to English and the Dutch, the newsletter with tips and tricks, fun facts, new translations and other good stuff about, well, English and the Dutch. In your inbox every second Wednesday.
The newsletter is written by me, Heddwen Newton. I also own the website www.hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl. If you are wondering, where did I sign up for this newsletter? That’s probably where you signed up for this newsletter. And if you have not yet signed up for this newsletter, you can do so right here:
Quiz
Question 1
It’s a Monday, the first of the month, and you get an invitation for a party “next weekend”. Is the party going to be in the weekend directly after the week you are in, the 6th and 7th of the month, or a week later, the 13th and 14th of the month?
Question 2
How would a native speaker interpret these sentences?
Eventually, I will go home.
His death was dramatic.
He’s a fanatical cyclist.
Question 3
The idiom depicted here is the same in English and Dutch. What’s the idiom?
Answers below!
Interview: Nigel Saych, tour guide
New and improved in your English-and-the-Dutch newsletter today: from now on, I’m going to do interviews!
My first subject was Nigel Saych, a tour guide from the UK who gives English-spoken tours about Vincent van Gogh through his home town of Nuenen. He also trains his Dutch-speaking colleagues to give tours in English. Here are a few of his tips:
Tip 1: Visitors don't care that your English is not perfect, and neither should you!
Your audience is not there to try to trick you out. They are visiting your country. They are grateful that you are taking the trouble to speak to them in their language, which is not the local language, and not your native language. They will not be looking for mistakes.
Tip 2: If you have trouble pronouncing a word, just choose a different word
English famously has many synonyms at its disposal, so if you are preparing a talk, and you find there's a word you always stumble on: just look up an alternative and use that one instead!
Tip 3: How to pronounce the "th"
For example, take the word “think”. Put the tip of your tongue between your teeth, and as you say the word, let go.
Find out more about Nigel, see what he looks like, and read the other seven tips in the interview.
Dutch/English in the news
“Niksen” is the new “hygge”
The Danish got “hygge” (which means more or less the same as the Dutch word “gezelligheid”) as their moment in the English-language-lifestyle sun. Now it seems the Dutch “niksen” might make an appearance as something for the Anglosphere to aspire to. Read more on The Big Think
Travelling the Dutch coastline of a potential future
The Washington Post featured an article plus pictures by Dutch photographer Michael Rhebergen. He travelled the potential new coastline of the Netherlands for his book De Nieuwe Kust. Read more in The Washington Post (archived)
New translations
I post a new translation on hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl every day. Here are a few recent ones that I am proud of.
met de voeten in het bluswater staan -
This was a question I got in my mailbox. “I like to be where it happens when there are problems", but how do I say that in English?”
I came up with quite a few translations. “Boots on the ground” is one that rather satisfyingly is also about feet. “To be on the front line” or “to be in the trenches” are both war-inspired idioms that could work. More here.
een schrijnend geval -
Another question I got was the English term to refer to a case that is so severe that an exeption must be made. I found that in the US this is referred to as “a hardship case”, and in the UK “a case of hardship”. I also go through the many possible translations of “schrijnend” on its own. More here.
deugpolitie -
All three of my favourite translations stem from questions this week.
The Dutch term “deugen” allowed me to write an article about the most interesting word for people like me (English linguists interested in language change): woke. It got picked up from African American English and entered standard English as a positive term around 2014. In just 4 years, it went from positive to negative, and is now almost exclusively used as a derogatory (= beledigend, kleinerend) term. I haven’t seen any official studies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the speed of this development broke some kind of linguistic record.
My favourite translation for “deugpolitie” is British-English “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati” which was used in UK parliament by conservative politician Suella Braverman last year. More here.
Quiz answers
Question 1
It’s a Monday, the first of the month, and you get an invitation for a party “next weekend”. Is the party going to be in the weekend directly after the week you are in, the 6th and 7th of the month, or a week later, the 13th and 14th of the month?
If your answer is “no idea”: congratulations! That’s the right answer.
In general, older Britons would call the 6th and the 7th “next weekend” whereas younger Britons would call that one “this weekend”. The younger generation would call the 13th and 14th “next weekend”, with older people calling that one “the weekend after next”. But there are plenty of older and younger people who do it the other way around, and the study that I got this data from (carried out in 2021) was only run in the UK.
I don’t have numbers, but from my experience, usage is also mixed in other English-speaking countries.
So what can you do? One simple rule: always note the date.
Question 2
How would a native speaker interpret these sentences?
Eventually, I will go home.
Te zijner tijd ga ik weer naar huis. Read more here.
His death was dramatic.
Zijn dood was theatraal. Read more here.
He’s a fanatical cyclist.
Hij is een fanatisch fietser. (Beetje doorgedraaid, dus). Read more here.
Question 3
The idiom depicted here is the same in English and Dutch. What’s the idiom?
De baby met het badwater weggooien. To throw out the baby with the bathwater. Read more here.
And finally…
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