“Oh”, said O’Neill; “that’s a reminder about a neat phrase I picked up from my landlady. Did I never tell you?
“Well. When my cousin came over, you know, on his way to Germany, he stayed with me a couple of days. He’s very athletic—a fine wiry, muscular young fellow, lithe as a willow, as you are aware. So I wasn’t astonished at overhearing the landlady and a crony of hers discussing him. They used a rumble of unintelligible words about Terence, as he passed the two of them on the stairs with the slightest of nods, and mounted three steps at a time, whistling as he went. There was no mistake about their referring to him; and amid the chaos of sounds I caught the words eng and engert.
Curious to know how Terence’s agility, or perhaps his swarthy complexion, had affected them, I turned up these terms of admiration in my dictionary; and found eng, ‘thin’, ‘narrow’. The longer word wasn’t there. But on the whole it seemed safe to conclude from eng meaning ‘narrow’, that engert would work out something like “fine strapping fellow and in excellent training”. If that was it, my landlady had hit the nail on the head. For Terence had just been carrying all before him at the last Trinity sports.
Her admiring criticism I duly entered in my notes and kept for use.
Some days after Terence had left, the landlady was praising her son’s cleverness to me; and to please her I just said that he was a wonderful boy. ‘Mirakel van een jongen’ was the expression I employed; and I was quite proud of it. But she didn’t seem appreciative of my effort, so I fell back on her own idiom. Fortunately the lad was quite slender, and I could dwell with satisfaction on the suitability of my new word.
“Hij is zoo eng”, I said. “Ja juffrouw hij is een engert!—een echte engert!!”
She received my encomium on her boy with speechless indignation, and rose and left the room. You can’t be too careful”, added O’Neill thoughtfully.
BETAALD ZETTEN.
“Jack,” said one of the students. “I prefer your own notes even to Boyton. Haven’t you some more? Ah, what’s this?” he enquired, turning to some pencillings inside the back. “Dat zou je wel willen”, he read aloud, “‘signification doubtful!’
“And here’s one marked ‘commercial’: ‘We’ll consider the transaction as settled’: Dutch apparently something like, ‘Dat zal ik u betaald zetten’. Here’s another labelled, ‘not deftig, but very popular’: ‘Ben je niet goed snik?’ Translation seems to be: ‘you’re not quite able to follow my meaning.’