Double Dutch, Go Dutch and 'Top Nation'

I was thinking today about how words, phrases enter a language and for some reason are retained long after the reason for their original adoption has vanished.

Now for more than 1,000 years before the Second World War, Britain and, before 1707 and the Act of Union, England, were 'Top Nation'. More importantly, in maintaining that supremecy, there was scarcely a people on the planet that they hadn't been to war with at some time, at least once and very often a good deal more than once. Admittedly some wars were defensive but none the less the list is impressive!

From fighting the Romans alongside their Gallic cousins which forced Caesar's invasions of the island in 55BC and later 54BC, and again a hundred or so years later against Claudius; fighting the Scandanavians for control of eastern England; being overun by invading Normans (Vikings with a French accent) and returning the favour a couple of hundred years later by invading France almost continually for a hundred years or more; tussling with Spain and Portugal for control of the high seas; fighting each other for a right not to be ruled by a long haired pansy with a pointy beard; fighting the new born American nation for the right to rule and tax and annoying the French in Canada, along with the indiginous populations; waltzing into just about every part of Africa with loaded guns; Australia, New Zealand, India, China, the Russian Empire, Germany, Italy, Japan, Iraq. I think South America only escaped until the twentieth century because it took that long for corned beef to be invented.

It's easier to count the nations the Brits haven't been to war with; Switzerland, the Brits don't like cuckoo clocks and Emmental cheese is just holes joined together by rubber; Leichtenstein, the Brits missed it, it was so small; Luxembourg, while common in childhood, an interest in philately wanes in the adult Brit and few wars have been caused by arguments over the optimum size of the perforations between stamps; Belgium, too recent.

Now somewhere in the middle of that list (about 1750-70 or thereabouts), the Brits got into a spat with the Netherlands, again over who was going to be top nation, this time on the high seas. Now the Brits eventually won but not before the Netherlands' Navy had engaged in the rather daring and, for the Brits, humiliating maneouvre of sailing up the Thames to London. Now wars invariably throw up disparaging terms for the oppoents but in these enlightened times they are seldom if ever used. No one seriously calls Germans '****' or the Chinese, '*****' or '******' but the Dutch insults appear not only to have been retained in English, even in these PC times, but are, it seems to this penguin, not now seen as racial slurs.

To 'go Dutch' (for each party to pay for themselves) originally, in a time when men invariably paid for food and drink, was an insult. It was meant to show how mean the Dutch were. Does anyone think that now? 'Double Dutch' was an insult based on the incomprehensibility of the Dutch language to English speakers with its strange gutterals, doubling that incomprehensibility made 'complete nonsense'. A 'Dutch Uncle'was someone who spoke to you in a blunt, unsympathetic way and perhaps worst of all, the idea that Dutch sailors had to get drunk before they could fight, 'Dutch courage'. It's strange that these seem to have hung around.

Perhaps, in the end, it is that the Netherlands is such a small country and the Brits actually have forgotten that they were once at war with them over the trading empires. They don't even think that there might be racial overtones, they just think it's at worst mildly joshing.

It's a strange country, the Netherlands. Large chunks of it reclaimed from the sea (polders). Great swathes of the countryside are below sea level so that as you come in from the sea, you descend before rising to the central massif, which at 1.2m above sea level commands an awesome view of the dyke system, which is the only thing that stops the Netherlands from being permanently under water, a kind of latter day Atlantis, only smaller.

It is the only country in Europe which teaches 'finger in the dyke' technology to its children from an early age. Once qualified, they form a volunteer force of willing fingers on bicycles, ready to rush to any dyke in the vicinity which has a finger sized hole in it and to remain for as long as it is necessary until a grown up can arrive with a repair kit.

They are composed of distinct types of people. The pale, dour, round-faced Goudas who mainly live below sea level and the happy, cherubic and ruddy skinned Edams who make up the bulk of the population on the central massif. The capital is Amsterdam after which New York was named*.

Enough Geography! As we all know, history ended in 1945 when America became top nation so there is no point in continuing with any of this now. Sellars and Yeatman were right. Stop!

* New York used to be called New Amsterdam until the Brits made the Dutch settlers change it!

PS Has it ever occured to you that the Romans counted backwards? Be honest!