“DUTCH” TABOO FOR THE DUTCH

Evening Star, Issue 23123, 24 November 1938, Page 11

“DUTCH” TABOO FOR THE DUTCH

Mm WITH OBJECTIONABLE MEANING When the Netherlands Government advised the United States Post Office Department recently that the Dutch East Indies, Dutch Guiana, and the Dutch West Indies would henceforth be known at the Netherlands Indies, Surinam, and Curacao respectively, it raised an old question—Why don’t the Netherlander want themselves and their possessions called Dutch? Dutch is taboo in the Netherlands for at least two reasons: First, observers note, the word Dutch has a German connotation, from “ Deutsch,” which the Netherlands Government declares is misleading. Only a small fraction of the Netherlands 70,000,000 population in Europe and the colonies is German. And the Netherlands and Germany have distinct racial and national characteristics. Second, Dutch, it has been pointed out, has had an uncomplimentary meaning in the past, _ which still persists in such English phrases as “ Dutch courage,” “ Dutch music,” “ Dutch comfort,” and the American slang expression “ in Dutch.” In the fifteenth century the term Dutch was used in England in the sense that Gorman is now used. It included the language of the people of the Netherlands as part of the Dutch or “ low German ” domain. AVhen the provinces of what now constitute the Netherlands became an independent State, Dutch was gradually restricted to the Netherlands as being the particular Dutch or German with whom the English came in contact. In the seventeenth century, when the English and the Hollanders were engaged in war or hitter rivalry for trade and colonies, the expressions of which Netherlander now complain cam© into use in England, and these expressions have survived to this day. A dictionary of English slang lists “O nf those derisive expressions which don’t please the Netherlander. Some of these are:— “ Beat the Dutch to do something remarkable. “ Do a Dutch ” —to desert. “ Dutch auction a mock auction or sale. “ Dutch bargain ” —a one-sided hargain. “ Dutch clock ” —a wife. “ Dutch feast a feast where the entertainer gets drunk before his guests. Dutch nightingale ” —a frog, “Dutch reckoning”—a lump account, without reckoning. “ Dutch treat ” —an entertainment at which each plays his own share. “ Dutch row ” —a got-up, unreal wrangle. As for. the strange Amencanisism, “in Dutch,” the dictionary maker have never got around to explaining where or how'it originated.