For the more trouble you take to forget a thing, the better you remember it. At least that’s my experience, and if I strain every nerve to get a word out of my head, it simply never goes! So if there be a Dutch noun that I recall accurately and without effort, it is just the scientific and poetical term for ‘lightning’.
[CHAPTER VI.]
A WASH-LIST IN DUTCH.
It was a day or two after the purchase of the pens and I was beginning to feel my zeal for Dutch returning, when the landlady entered the sitting-room and fired my enthusiasm. She had a collar and a pocket-handkerchief in her hand; she waved them in the air and said “Voor de waschvrouw.”
I caught the idea at once, banished the landlady, and sat down to make out a wash-list with the help of the dictionary and by the light of nature.
HOE TO SELECT YOUR WORD.
In bold characters I headed my document ‘Lijst voor de Waschvrouw’; and turned up the word ‘collar’. The usual thing, of course, met my gaze—a bewildering supply of equivalents—boordje, rollade, kraag, halsband, halssieraad. Now for the crucial question—on what principle am I to make my selection? For I was quite determined to stick by the principle I had learnt in the pen-shop, and use only one Dutch word for one word in English. But which one? The dictionary had a second part to it, Dutch into English. So I felt sure in my innocence that I could hunt down anything and get its exact signification.
I tried ‘boordje’.
It was a bad omen that ‘boordje’ didn’t figure in the Dutch-English part at all. Naturally a man reasons that if boordje really means a common thing like collar—an article of attire in daily use—it would surely be given a place in a Dutch-English lexicon. It wasn’t there; and to confirm me in my determination to reject ‘boordje’, my eye caught ‘boord’. ‘Boord’ was of fairly catholic application; for it included things as dissimilar as border, rim, shelf, seam, bank and hem. To make a diminutive of this,—‘little border’, ‘little rim’, ‘little bank’,—wouldn’t bring one measurably nearer ‘collar’. Boordje therefore was rejected absolutely. So far good.