Dutch words.

With only one week until classes start, we have been scrambling to fit in all the fun summer activities that we can. While we haven't been climbing mountaintops, we have been welcoming back many of our friends who had spent the summer elsewhere.

Yesterday, we also welcomed a new law student who was a fellow college classmate, now a fellow alum, I guess, and who grew up just a few blocks from my cousins down in Iowa. She has made the trek out to the Atlantic, leaving behind all that is familiar in the midwest.

Ryan and I enjoyed the chance to talk about college and home (for him anyways) with someone with a delightful midwestern accent (I was apparently the only one who noticed the accent). I was also the only one who noticed the Dutch words that had slipped into the conversation.

After she left, I went on a mission to figure out what these foreign words actually, literally meant in English. The problem is that most people who still use these words have forgotten (or never realized) that they aren't actually English words.

I have found that one easy way to figure out if a word is English or just a Dutch remnant still used in the middle of English is to ask the speaker how to spell the word. Without a doubt, they stop and think, maybe start with a few letters, but never quite figure it out. Those words are only spoken in the gaps where our great grandmothers couldn't find an English word that quite said what they wanted to say.

So I have decided to go on a search to find the spelling, as well as literal translations, for all those little words that are still used.

Today's word is "benauwd" commonly pronounced ben-out. When I heard this word in conversation yesterday, I knew that I had heard it before, whether from my grandmother or someone else, I'm not sure. But I only had a vague idea of what it actually meant. In my head, I usually translated it as "bent out" like "I'm feeling a bit bent out of shape today."

What I discovered (after a quick call to my mom, and some searching on google translator) was that benauwd means something like "stuffy, uncomfortable, stifling, and cramped." Yesterday, it was used in reference to the feeling when driving through the bridge tunnel and realizing that you are actually driving underneath the river.

For my next words, I think I'm going to have to search a little harder. Maybe even give my grandmothers a call to see how much they can remember. I'm definitely going to start integrating them into my vocabulary and conversation. Even if no one around here understands.