An article over at the Independent about a forthcoming book (link to Independent) that will (most likely) attract language lovers in the world: ‘The meaning of Tingo’ from Adam Jacot de Boinod.
The article over at the Independent lists the paper’s favourite foreign words and one of them is the Dutch word ‘queesting’, a word Anglo-Saxians know as ‘bundling’. Apparently, the practice was brought to the New Continent by ‘those pesky liberal pinko moonbat’ Dutch sailors in the early 1700s and naturally, the practice didn’t sit quite well with moral preachers on the New Continent.
Talking about words: in one of the links above, I noticed a mention of the Dutch word called ‘plimplampletteren’, which is described as ‘skimming stones’. I’ve heard of the game ‘pim-pam-pet’ before, but the word variant with the extra ‘L’ does not ring a bell here. However ‘plimplampletteren’ reminds of the act of ‘plumpen’, which is a variety of the Dutch game of ‘knikkeren’.
I’ll leave it to my readership to figure out what plumpen exactly is about. If you’ve lived as a kid in the Seventies, you’re probably aware that it’s one of the most innocent games a kid can play.
Update: Closely related ‘Sniglets’ or sniglets (Wikipedia).
Update 2: Oh yes: the weirdest Dutch boardgame ever (after ‘Mens Erger Je Niet’): Pim-pam-pet!
Update 3: Thinking of it, ‘skimming stones’ reminds me of ‘keilen’, a word that describes the actual act of ‘throwing stones over water so that they bounce on the surface’. Keilen, I think, is a made up Dutch word that consists of ‘kei’ (stone/rock) and ‘zeilen’ (sailing).