Friday, August 16, 2013

Dutch tourist.



My one (Dutch) colleague from school told me the other day that his parents and younger siblings are visiting this summer.

The last time his mom was here in the city, she went around to souvenir shops asking for faggots, since her English isn’t good and his little (impaired) brother collects miniatures of musical instruments.

(“Faggot” is Dutch for bassoon; my guess is that the word must have meant ‘stick’ at some point in a common Germanic ancestor language, since in old fairy tale collections I’ve seen it used to mean ‘firewood’, in sentences like “Hansel and Gretel were sent out to the forest to collect faggots for the kitchen fire...’)

3 comments:

JUSIPER said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

How did people respond?

el blogador said...

They were very very confused by her blithe use of the word.