English and the Dutch

Category: language usage

  • All the ways to use “shit” in English

    This fun meme did the rounds a few years ago:

    Here are the definitions from Wiktionary and an example sentence for each:

    apeshit: “Out of control due to anger or excitement”

    I told him the bad news, and he went apeshit.


    batshit: “Too irrational to be dealt with sanely”

    Don’t take any courses from that professor. She’s completely batshit.


    bullshit: “False or exaggerated statements made to impress and deceive the listener rather than inform”

    Don’t pay any attention to him. He talks a lot of bullshit.


    chickenshit: “Petty and contemptible; contemptibly unimportant”; “a coward”

    I told him I wasn’t having his insults, and he just backed right down. What a chickenshit.


    dogshit: “very poor quality.”

    My dogshit bike broke again.


    horseshit: “Serious harassment or abuse”; “Blatant nonsense, more likely stemming from ignorance than any intent to deceive”

    He thinks vinegar is alkaline? Don’t you realize that’s horseshit?

    Heddwen Newton is an English teacher and a translator from Dutch into English. She has two email newsletters:
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  • My collection of proof that “clothes” rhymes with “nose”

    I’m not sure why it is, and I am worried that Dutch secondary school English teachers are to blame, but lots of Dutch people completely mispronounce the word “clothes”.

    They say something like “clothe-ees”. Though one of the main principles of this blog is that having a Dutch accent is okay, in this case this pronunciation doesn’t work because it will lead to misunderstandings.

    Also, the solution is so easy: “clothes” rhymes with “nose”. Don’t believe me? Listen to Avril Lavigne

    “All of her friends, they stuck up their nose, they had a problem with his baggy clothes.”

    Or look at this Simpsons quote:

    Or click through these 25372 videos on YouGlish. (Don’t worry, just clicking through the first ten or so is fine.)

    Or look at this meme:

    But I asked a native speaker and they said it was “cloath-zzzz”

    If you ask a native speaker about their language, they are going to want to be helpful and tell you what they feel is the “correct” pronunciation. So they’ll think about the spelling and pronounce it slowly for you, and then they will indeed end up pronouncing the “th” in the middle (as a hard th, by the way, as in “them”).

    But when native speakers are just talking and not thinking about it, they’ll say “I bought some new close.” I promise. Unfortunately, most people don’t realise how they actually talk so if you ask them they might insist that they always pronounce the “th”. People are funny that way.

    Heddwen Newton is an English teacher and a translator from Dutch into English. She thinks about languages way too much, for example about how strange it is that these little blurb things are written in the third person.

    Heddwen has two children, two passports, two smartphones, two arms, two legs, and two email newsletters.

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