| Trust me, Russian can be equally hilarious for us Dutch. Its just that Dutch is a less widely spoken language. Blyat for example almost reads like blaat which to us is the sound a sheep makes. It also refers to blaten, talking nonsense. The English word cunt sounds like the Dutch kunt which means can (je kunt means you can). Kunt gets censored in a popular game, even if the rest of sentence is Dutch. Then we have German where an English listener might think bisschen means bitch, and generally an English speaker might think a German is angry while its just the sound of the language (in contrast to, say, French). Recently, some Dutch song (I think it was Belgian?) went viral in Ukraine as well. Anyway, as a native Dutch speaker with autism, gezellig is equal to Orwellian double speak like Russian pravda (theres other examples, too). If its gezellig for others, it might very well not be for me. Or its tokkie level (tokkie = white trash). In other words, not a word I value when others use it. EDIT: I believe you might find this song by a comedian weird for different reasons than intended: https://youtu.be/ATdRtTtzZ3c (he is singing good morning, good afternoon, its like this: I am a customer). |
Ahhhh a distant cousin to the "Scunthorpe problem" - English and Dutch are not so dissimilar after all!
Related problem I saw recently, guy called Nasser had the "ass" in his name in some game's chat replaced with the string "***" taking a very common name and making it look like he named himself perhaps the worst word in the English language. Very unfortunate.