The misuse of English by the Dutch is one of Martin’s pet peeves and it’s the NRC Handelsblad’s English language blog’s too, only they call it Denglish.
You say tomato, I say pomodori. They call it Denglish; I call it Nederlish. Denglish could be anything, any odd amalgam of Danish or Deutsch or Dutch and English, whereas I don’t know any languages other than Nederlands that have Neder as a prefix, so Nederlish saves confusion.
There are a couple of Dutch misuses of English that really do get my goat. First is the TV ad for hair remover Veet, which has the tagline ‘…what beauty feels like’. This is pronounced by the female Dutch voiceover artist as ‘wod byoody feelz lahk’.
Byoody? WTF’s ‘byoody’? Is she trying to be American? Can’t she read? What? Drives me totally nuts every time I see it.
The other major irritant is a recent poster campaign for the anti-AIDS NGO ‘One Mens’. It’s supposed to mean ‘One man’ as in ‘One man can make a difference’. But in that case, it should be either ‘One Man’ in English, or ‘Een Mens’ in Dutch, not the bastard hybrid offspring ‘One Mens’.
Speak one or other, dammit!
