Strangely enough, the usage of those two simple, everyday words is quite often the other way round in Dutch when referring to abstracts rather than tangible objects.
Author Archives: Mike Wilkinson
What comes between junior and senior?
Well, not “medior” at any rate. That’s a fabrication, an anglicization.
Habits such as: colons before lists
Dutch typography regularly seems to use a superfluous colon to introduce a list of items – sometimes even a ‘list’ of one!
“Euro” as a prefix
Eurocrat, Eurotrash, Eurospeak… prefixing something with “Euro” in English is often intended as a negative connotation. Unlike on the Continent.
Paying attention
An ‘attentie’ in Dutch is a small gift, just a little something to show appreciation. The English word ‘attention’ doesn’t have that meaning.
Don’t mention it
When someone mentions something, it’s a minor sideline, a small point. “Oh, by the way…” Not a general verb for a statement in a report or document.
Survival rations
The relative numeric sizes of things are expressed as a ratio, not a ration.
Chapter and verse
A document really has to be pretty large before you can call its subdivisions “chapters”. We’re talking a small book, not a ten-pager.
A programme of programs
In British English, the spelling “program” is normally used nowadays for IT but “programme” is still the norm for other contexts.
A telling point
The verb “to tell” is quite widely used and versatile in English, but comparatively rarely used by non-natives.
Advanced Dunglish 