Editor’s Note March 2017
This March I am thrilled to be able to publish an article by our very own Dr. Martin Bakker. Dr. Bakker was a regular contributor to dis magazine for many years and author of the popular “Beter Nederlands” column. Many of you have been asking about his health and so I contacted him. He reported that he was doing very well and regaining his strength. He mentioned that he hoped someday to once again be able to write a little something for our members. Imagine my surprise when the next day a piece from him arrived in my inbox!
I wanted to get it out to you as soon as possible, so I moved a few things around this issue to make room. If that means the magazine hits your mailbox a little later than normal, I apologize. But Dr. Bakker, WELCOME BACK! The piece is mostly in Dutch, so you members will have to practice your language skills. I’ve done a quick translation of the first paragraph to get you started.
Loose and Tight
We used to say that at school “Teacher, how do you write bike plus path, loose or tight? Is bike path one word or two? Words that you write together? Is it bike path or bikepath?” And then came the explanation, because we also wanted to know why “do you write two words as one word – tight together?” The teacher would say, “Don’t compare it with English, because English has very different rules than Dutch for “joining words”.
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If you haven’t seen the hilarious YouTube video “America First, The Netherlands Second” being passed around everywhere, get one of your grandkids to show it to you. It was first aired on the Dutch channel NPO3 show “Zondag met Lubach” and has since spawned over a dozen videos from other countries vying to be second to America. There was even a petition on the White House website to ‘make Netherlands second because they requested it’ in a nice way. The petition has been shut down but not before it got over 67,000 signatures.
The Netherlands has its own general election coming up this month. I report on one way of understanding the many parties participating in “Methods of Pannekoeken Cooking : a Voter’s Guide, Explained” on page 9 of this issue, and in further exploring Dutch politics, regular contributor Dr. Gerlof Homan writes about the history of women’s sufferage in the Netherlands.
It’s not all politics in this issue, however. We’ve got a call to transnationalism from Dr. Henk Aay, a history lesson from Bob Yonker, and a report on the goings on at Windmill Island from Matt Helmus.
If you have a story to tell or an article in the works, do your part to help the next generation get transnational and send it in!
Look for your dis membership renewal card next month. Thank you in advance for your support and consider encouraging others to help us keep the work going!
Alvast bedankt allemaal!
— Arend Vander Pols
