Sad I Nekad

I took the above title from a comic in the magazine Zone5300. Apparently it means "now and then", as in the temporal indications, not the english expression. It was a magazine in Belgrade that published articles speculating what the changes in vocabulary were, and that noted new words that they thought would become influential.

To force myself to blog a bit more often, I will add at least a daily word find on here, most commonly a Dutch word, with an English explanation of what it means, where I found it, and why it charmed me. Likely it will mostly involve made-up words in the media or in conversations that could, for those inexplicable cultural reasons, either become popular enough to get included in the dictionary, or not and just be forgotten. These are the things my mind occupies itself with for a few minutes a day, and the least I can blog about are those.

For starters, I'll do one for today AND for yesterday. Let's start off with yesterday,shall we ?

Word of the day for 17/1/05: Slaviertje.
This word was invented by a colleague to be able to discuss a special kind of service agreement they were cooking up for several of our clients. Normally you would use a Service Level Agreement or SLA (simply pronounced 'sla', which also means lettuce in Dutch) but these kinds of documents consist of many pages, and the simpler agreements the colleage was talking about would only be about one page. A page is most commonly A4 format, so the word became SLA-A4, SLA4, slaviertje.
Much hilarity ensued in the office environment and the next day it was still in use. I don't know how long it will last and how popular it will turn out, likely it will die a quiet, quick death and be forever forgotten - except on this blog, of course.

Word of the day for 18/1/05: Kraanwaterdrinkers.
This one I read in the free Metro newspaper today, which wrote an article about how tap water turned out, in marketing research, to be the fourth popular 'brand' of drink amongst young people in The Netherlands. The article then proceeds to mention the people who regularly consume tap water as 'kraanwaterdrinkers', drinkers of tap water. These words are, in good Dutch tradition, composed into one word that most foreigners probably would not be able to make sense of, and the practical use of the word is highly doubtful. Definately a gem for the records.