The best Dutch word of 2008 is penis swinging
We at 24 oranges always want to know what the youth is up to, and the winner of the best Dutch word for 2008 comes straight out of youth culture to teach us a new verb: swaffelen, conveniently spelled and pronounced the same in English and said to be an English word with Dutch and German roots.
The urban legend origin of the word comes from some boy, who during a school trip to India, “swaffeled” against the Taj Mahal, which is more than just bad etiquette. Basically, he swung his penis so that it touched the holy building and the film of this incident is rumoured to be floating around the Internet. Somehow I don’t need visual confirmation.
The second place winner was “wiien”, a verb about playing the Wii, while third place went to “bankendomino”, (“bank domino”), which refers to banks falling like dominoes as of late.
(Link: depers.nl)
I’m not surprised swaffelen is a popular word but the most popular? I would have expected men and boys to choose it as their favorite but I’m quite surprised the other half would do so. Ha ha.
“bankendomino” not so funny. About half of my retirement is gone in paper losses. In the US, you keep you own account. It was invested in equity (stocks), it was diversified (indexed funds) and about 20% was in international indexed funds (Europe, Asia, pacific rim, etc.). I have many years to work before I need it to pay my bills and buy my food so I hope it recovers or I will live a poor retirement without travel. Bankendomino, not funny. ;-p
wii, dicks…how about sexism, that one’s hysterical.
[…] traditional media such as ‘gedoogregering’ (2010). The crowd favourite at parties is ‘swaffelen’ (2008). If you don’t know it, click to read about […]