Subject:
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Re: Phrase
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.fun
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Date:
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Sun, 24 Jun 2001 23:46:28 GMT
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Viewed:
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363 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.fun, Manfred Moolhuysen writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.fun, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> > So here's a question for the language geeks. Whyfore that phrase? The
> > Hollanders I've met (that actually were from the Netherlands, not to be
> > confused with all the Hollanders that live around here in Grand Rapids)
> > were, to a person, kind and generous. Not the sort that worry about
> > splitting the check exactly in half.
> >
> > So why the bum rap?
>
> Where it not the English who came up with that phrase ? If I'm not
> mistaking, the've linked some very nasty habits to our nationality during
> the time we fought out a fierce naval war with them. There was an incident
> where the Dutch destoid and captured some ships right under their eyes in
> their naval base Chatham, and they probably hated us for doing so (or for
> being too greedy and refusing to return those ships to them).
No, it was the act of the theft of those ships in the Sound in
1667. It's one of the only times that London (the city of)
actually *panicked* over a foreign threat. If memory serves, it
was one of the fleet flagships that the Dutch made off with--
Lord Albemarle's _Royal Charles_, which had been his flagship
at the Four Days' Battle in 1666. With the recent fire in London
and money in short supply to cover the navy, it was a really
bad time to have the Dutch show up and swipe valuable ships.
Well, it wasn't actually the *Dutch* who made off with it--it
was a Dutch fleet supported by a lot of disaffected English
mercenary seamen, and the _Royal Charles_ was in fact the same
ship that had brought Charles II back from Holland in 1660!
So one couldn't have hoped for a much better symbolic victory.
The great admiral de Ruyter led the raid, so no wonder it's
remembered! ;) If that weren't enough, the Dutch had more
naval success against England than any other nation--even the
United States. So it's only natural the English language
would include those old prejudices. I wonder what anti-Engelse
slogans remain in Dutch?
But as for the slur, to be "in dutch" is to be in disfavour or
trouble, not that Americans use it anymore. The origin of
"Dutch auction" is that it's handled backwards (ie., wrong);
"double Dutch" is a slur meaning "gibberish." There's "Dutch
comfort" (being cold), "Dutch courage" (the false courage of
the inebriated), and a few that aren't typable here. They
*all* date back to the seventeenth century and the commercial
and military rivalry between England and the Netherlands.
Of course, that was all resolved: England got the military
supremacy, and the Dutch went off and bought everything
(including, recently, two major supermarket chains in the US
and Barings Bank, which bankrolled much of Britain's imperial
expansion in the 19th/20th centuries). The whole time other
nations handled protecting Dutch interests at their own cost--
a very canny strategy, that only the Indonesian debacle
doesn't jibe with.
best
Lindsay
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Phrase
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| The following is a totally serious post, my apologies for posting it in .fun... In lugnet.off-topic.fun, Lindsay Frederick Braun writes: <more than you probably expected could be said about 17th century naval history... unless you knew the (...) (23 years ago, 25-Jun-01, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Phrase
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| (...) Where it not the English who came up with that phrase ? If I'm not mistaking, the've linked some very nasty habits to our nationality during the time we fought out a fierce naval war with them. There was an incident where the Dutch destoid and (...) (23 years ago, 24-Jun-01, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
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