December 4, 2020

Time to vote for the Worst Dutch Slogans of 2020

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 3:04 pm

Regardless of the state the world’s in, some things march on, and one of those things is voting on the worst Dutch slogans of 2020.

There are 10 in the running, but let’s pick the raisins out of the porridge, as the Dutch would say. And if you follow the link below, you can cast your vote as well.

First, the obligatory dirty joke that’s surprisingly not misogynistic, from animal protection group Gaia: ‘Laat je poesje knippen voor ze begint te wippen’ (roughly, ‘Get your pussy fixed before they start reproducing’, but rhyming and a bit funnier. ‘Wippen’ here is Dutch for ‘having sex’ and amusingly enough it means ‘see-sawing’, which the Dutch associate with the act.

Then, there’s the quintessential ‘poop and fart’ joke, from Rennie, pills that help against flatulence and stomach acid: ‘Liefde maakt blind, maar je neus ruikt nog steeds een wind’ (roughly, ‘Love is blind, but your nose can still smell a wind’. Sadly, ‘blind’ (blind) and wind (wind/fart) rhyme in Dutch, but not in English.

And there’s always the Dunglish joke, that you need to know Dutch and English to understand, and that would be ‘O my goot…’ (‘oh my gutter…’) from a roofing company. ‘Goot’ is Dutch for ‘gutter’, and of course the slogan is trying to say ‘Oh my God’ in English, which in Dutch would be ”Mijn God’, with ‘God’ and ‘goot’ sounding very similar.

UPDATE: ‘Laat je poesje knippen voor ze begint te wippen’ from animal organisation Gaia won.

(Link: sloganverkiezing.nl)

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December 10, 2018

Cheesiest slogans of 2018 are up for vote

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 4:57 pm
Kdag2010-2

It’s that time again, time for cringeworthy bad slogans, and much like in 2016 (see link below), we’ve got a fun one in the running from a barbershop in Laren: ‘We do women, but we don’t cut their hair’ (‘We doen wel vrouwen maar knippen ze niet’). It started as a joke that their male clients and female friends thought was funny, and it kind of stuck.

And in the running, there’s always a construction-related business as always, with ‘Don’t fuck around yourself, call Ronald Schutte!’ (‘Ga niet zelf kutte, bel Ronald Schutte’). My rough translation of ‘kutte’ is basically ‘fuck around’, but in this case, it’s a verb made from the noun for female genitalia that indicates the same thing and even rhymes.

Last but not least, there’s ‘For every arse, there’s an Aarts toilet’, (‘Voor ieder reetje een Aarts W.C’tje’). Once again, the word ass ‘reet/reetje’ [diminutive] rhymes with W.C’tje’ [diminutive for toilet aka water closet = WC], the name of the company.

And you can vote here.

See also: Cheesiest business slogans of the year 2016. and Cheesiest slogans of 2017 up for vote.

UPDATE: ‘We do women, but we don’t cut their hair’ took the win, with ‘Ga niet zelf kutte, bel Ronald Schutte’ winning second place and ‘Voor ieder reetje een Aarts W.C’tje’ taking third place. Read the rest.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

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December 11, 2017

Cheesiest slogans of 2017 up for vote

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 11:52 am
Kdag2010-2

Yes, 2016 had a real winner with ‘Zit je haircut’. Pronounce ‘hair’ in English and ‘cut’ (‘kut’) in Dutch, the latter being the word for what the Brits call the ‘c-bomb’, but in this case means ‘shitty’.

Here are some contenders for the ‘Worst Business Slogans of 2017’: ‘Voor iedere gleuf een doos’ (Moniss packing materials, Lelystad), which is ‘For every slit (possibly, tab), there’s a box’. The problem is that ‘gleuf’ is slang for female genitalia and so is ‘box’. For the advance students, it might remind you a bit of this song by Herman Brood. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s ‘Wees geen domme gans, steun de Dierenambulance!’ (Animal ambulance, Amsterdam), which translates as ‘Don’t be a silly goose, support the animal ambulance!’. It rhymes in Dutch and has a cheesy, family-friendly animal pun.

And there’s always the aural squinting, where you have to read one word in Dutch and one word in English to make the joke work that in fact doesn’t work at all. In that category, there’s ‘Haring is caring’, from the herring monger at camping Bakkum near Amsterdam. ‘Haring’ (herring) is then pronounced in Dutch ‘HA-ring’, which doesn’t rhyme with ‘caring’ in English. In fact, ‘Herring is caring’ would have been less fishy.

The winners will be announced later this week.

(Link: trouw.nl)

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August 9, 2017

Interactive shawls feature Tourette’s swearing

Filed under: Design,Fashion by Orangemaster @ 12:47 pm

Shawl

For her graduation project at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, Corlieske Visser has made shawls with interactive prints featuring audio patterns of her father’s bouts of swearing caused by his Tourette’s.

To create the shawls, Visser sat down with her father in a recording studio for two and a half hours. The sound waves of the recordings were transformed into images and eventually abstract prints (Dutch), which were then linked to the Dutch augmented reality app Layar. You can scan the prints using Layar and hear what Visser’s father had to say. The shawls are for sale, and 15% of the profits go to the Dutch Gilles de la Tourette Foundation.

Names after French physician Gilles de la Tourette who coined the syndrome, Tourette’s is often made fun of and not taken seriously. Part of Visser’s goal with her shawls is to draw attention to some of the positive aspects of Tourette’s. Visser explains that swearing puts people off and because of this, people with Tourette’s like her father are seen as crazy or anti-social. However, Visser’s father is also very good at imitating sounds, which shows a positive side of the syndrome.

(Link: creators.vice.com, Image: corlieske.nl)

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September 17, 2014

Dutch children call each names like ‘homo’ and ‘Jew’

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 6:31 pm
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As young as eight years old, a report says Dutch children have taken a particular liking to swearing at each other using words like ‘homo’ (‘faggot’), ‘hoer’ (‘whore’), ‘marokkaan’ (‘Moroccan’) and ‘Jood’ (‘Jew’). Kids call each other names based on sexuality, ethnicity and religion instead of things like appearance or ‘bad’ clothing.

Teachers from around the country feel that the news has a very big effect on children, especially when they use the word ‘Jew’. Long story short, the Netherlands doesn’t have many Jews and has many more Muslims, hence the use of that word. I wonder if children of all backgrounds use ‘Moroccan’ or just white kids, and I wonder what extra meaning it has when they use it because it seems a lot of people are clueless as to why it would be a swear word, unless you put a nasty adjective in front of it.

As for ‘Jew’, the fact that Ajax football players are called that by supporters of opposing teams (‘Jews’ as a social-historical swear word for residents of Amsterdam, back when there were more Jews) reinforces it as a easy to reach insult.

Back in July the parents of a nine-year-old boy heard their son yell ‘homo’ ‘faggot’ at someone and made him literally pay for it.

(Links: www.dutchnews.nl, www.telegraaf.nl)

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July 9, 2014

Child made to pay for homophobic swearing

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:26 pm
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Parents of a nine-year-old boy heard their son use the word ‘homo’, which is a Dutch swear word equivalent to ‘faggot’ in weight and meaning, and made him pay for it. He had to pay 0,10 euro to COC Netherlands, the Dutch LGBT organisation.

The payment had an explanation from the parents: “Sorry for the odd amount, but this is a ‘fine’ for using the word ‘faggot’ as a swear word (9 years old). He understands what he did wrong now.”

A COC employee said that ‘faggot’ is the most popular swear word at Dutch schools. A gay friend of mine who teaches at a secondary school in Amsterdam recently disciplined a boy for calling another boy ‘faggot’ and had to explain why that was wrong. The issue was that the boy didn’t see the connection between an actual homosexual like his teacher and calling someone a ‘faggot’, but I’m sure he gets it now, too.

The swear word ‘homo’ in films by the New Kids (view the trailer at 0:28 and let it roll for 10-15 sec even if you don’t speak Dutch) is used more like ‘pussy’, which doesn’t really offend people somehow because the films’ characters are total white trash douches themselves.

(Link: www.lindanieuws.nl)

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September 27, 2012

Calling your boss a ‘f****** whore’ shouldn’t get you fired

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 3:32 pm

The Dutch use English swear words all the time now, including at work where an employee of food wholesaler Sligro called his team leader a ‘fucking whore’ (in Dutch, ‘fucking hoer’) and was fired on the spot for it.

The employee who had been working there for 10 years was all like fuck this shit and sued his employer. Usually, in the Netherlands if an employer wants to fire an employee they have to go to a judge to ask permission, except when it is down on the spot according to severe guidelines. The story goes that a group of employees had issues with the team leader and like the Dutch say, the tall tree catches the wind.

Not only does the employee get their job back if they want it, but they will also be paid for the time they could not work. Yes, it’s not nice to call your superior a ‘fucking whore’, but it’s not grounds for dismissal, just grounds for some finger wagging.

On a similar note, back in 2011, a Dutch court ruled that ACAB was not insulting to cops, an abbreviation meaning ‘All Cops Are Bastards’, which was tattooed on some guy’s body while another guy had it printed on a jacket.

(Link: www.welingelichtekringen.nl, Photo of Middle finger by Jone Samsa, some rights reserved)

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April 29, 2011

Successful film has German tourists invading small town

Filed under: Dutch first,Fashion,Film,Music by Orangemaster @ 11:32 am

Last year we told you that white trash was the new cool and that it was contagious. The film New Kids Turbo is a huge hit in the Netherlands, but New Kids fever has hit Germany so hard that tourists are ‘invading’ Maaskaantje, Brabant the actual town where the film was shot. As of yesterday, 186 film theatres in Germany are featuring New Kids Turbo, an absolute Dutch record. The Dutch actors dubbed over their own film into German, and I agree, it adds more comedy to it.

In true Dutch style, people are seeing an increase in German kids and even families hanging out drinking beer and swearing like in the movie in Maaskantje, but the tourists are spending money locally, which probably makes up for it. The local tourist board is offering special hotel deals boasting a bike tour along the places the New Kids hang out: filling station and the snack bar.

The video above is the official German trailer and some of you will recognise the Dutch accent the kids have when they speak German.

I for one am enjoying the irony of two recent postings about how cool the Dutch are in Germany.

(Link: depers.nl)

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January 29, 2011

A carnival hit that tells it like it is

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 6:00 pm

Just two days ago I posted that “swear words in a foreign language are often perceived to be not as bad as in your own language,” and to back it up, here’s another carnival song called ‘Fok Joe’ (phonetic Dutch for ‘Fuck You’).

The opening shot of the ‘security guy’ has his Julian Assange look down pat, while singer Danny Panadero went as the doppelgänger of Pitbull, albeit with a mullet.

“I have a hit because there’s ‘fuck you’ in it,” the song of a Dutch ‘volkszanger’ (literally ‘folk singer’, but meaning ‘singer of the people’) who predominantly sings light ditties about love and life, a style that is popular in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany and very appreciated during carnival.

Around 1:40 Panadero is singing at a children’s birthday party and mentions that K3, one if not still the most successful Dutch-language act ever who sing kiddy songs, should sing “a fuck you” as well.

‘Fuck you’ in Dutch sounds too banal,
but sing it in English and the whole place sings along.

He took the swear words right out of my mouth.

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December 2, 2010

The News Kids film: white trash is hot

Filed under: Fashion,Film,Music by Orangemaster @ 10:28 am

A film nobody has really been waiting for is coming out on 9 December: the New Kids film ‘Turbo’. Website Flabber also tell us that they’ll be a German version of the film as well because these wild and crazy guys have fans in Germany. Yes, it sounds and even looks like an American film trailer, but do not be fooled by the voice-over! The English subtitles are both inaccurate on purpose and not on purpose (the swear word ‘kut’ (used like ‘damn’ or ‘shit’, but meaning ‘cunt’) is left intact, while ‘your fired’ should be ‘you’re fired’. And it’s so not about the dialogue.

From the province of Noord-Brabant or just Brabant (there’s no South Brabant, that would be Brabant in Belgium and a long story), the New Kids are popular because they represent relatively modern Dutch white trash with accompanying music, known as happy hardcore and matching late 1990s clothing: sporty camping comfort with mustaches and mullet hairdoes.

“They’re basically always drunk, driving around and destroying everything that comes in their way, which sometimes leads to getting a good beating themselves.”

For the beginners, it’s time to learn what ‘doe normaal!’ (literally, ‘act normal’!, meaning ‘stop it!’), a lesson you’ll not soon forget.

(Link: flabber)

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