Word of the Week: Dutchman

dutchman

\ˈdəch-mən\

One of our domestic pleasures is watching reruns of This Old House: the venerable PBS reality show about home renovation.

I will confess that part of the fun is sneering at the conspicuous consumption exhibited by some of the homeowners (“Marble tile? In the KIDS’ bathroom?” I mutter. “And you’re making your roof gutters ENTIRELY OUT OF COPPER??” )

And part of it is the Schadenfreude when the plumbing guy makes his first descent into the basement and intones Cassandra-like (if Cassandra had been blessed with a thick Boston accent): “Well, there’s a fair bit of seepage here under the sub-floor.”

But for the most part the show is extremely soothing. The problems are so practical: a drafty attic, a crumbling deck, an inconvenient doorway. Competent workmen solve them all. They hammer and saw and lay bricks, and eventually the homeowners move back in to shiny new kitchens and much-diminished bank accounts.

Plus the workmen speak a wonderful language—full of routers and bullnoses and rabbits. And at least once in every season someone has occasion to fix a broken doorjamb or re-set a window and announces that he’s going to use a “dutchman.” 

By USCapitol (Stone Drum "Dutchman" Repairs) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In the building trades, a “dutchman” is a piece of wood or stone that is carved to shape and used to fill a gap or repair a broken or rotten section of something. Interesting, but why call it a dutchman? I ran the question past a couple of real Dutchmen (and Dutchwomen) of my acquaintance. Had they heard of this term? What do Dutch people call this kind of little patch? Being primarily mathematicians, however, my friends could offer little insight. 

So I was forced to fall back on Google. One source (devoted to the history of stage construction) offers a reasonably plausible story that is almost certainly not true. According to this account a famine in the early 18th century led to a large migration of Dutch people to England, many of whom sought work in the building trades. At the time, the English were using wattle and daub to finish walls, which (apparently) meant that every wall had to be finished in a single work session. But the Dutch had figured out a technique that was much closer to modern drywall: they applied plaster and straw to a plank, let it dry, and then put the planks in place, using strips of linen and plaster to cover the joints.

The English workmen, being set in their ways (and possibly seeing their own livelihood compromised by these interlopers), viewed this approach with considerable scorn--a despicable shortcut countenanced only by sots and foreigners. They coined the term “dutchman” to refer to the act of covering up sloppy workmanship, whether with a plaster veneer or a wooden patch. After a while, though, even the nativist English realized that wattle and daub was a huge hassle and the new technique was faster, cheaper AND allowed for more decorative detail. And gradually the term “dutchman” lost its pejorative edge and even became a complimentary nod to the frugality of a people who will carefully patch a flaw rather than replacing the whole beam. 

So far so good, but then Grimbert came along and asked why on earth we call the Dutch Dutch anyway? They don’t live in Dutch-land. This, I thought, was an excellent question. Turns out the word comes from the Old High German diota, meaning “people” or “nation.” In 9th century Germany this word was used to mean roughly “what regular people talk” (as opposed to Latin) and soon came to be a broad ethnic term referring to anyone who spoke German as their vernacular. By the 12th or 13th century the country was known as Diutisklant – today Deutschland – and it included the language and people of what is today the Netherlands. When a big chunk of this region became an independent state in the 1580s, the local inhabitants were speaking a variant of German called “Nederduytsch”  (literally “Low German” because it was spoken in the low-lying countries near the North Sea, as opposed to the relatively high ground of Germany). And the English, right across the channel, gradually came to use the term ‘Dutch’ to refer exclusively to the Netherlanders since this was the particular subset of the Germanic people that they had the most dealings with. 

So while in English Dutch is Dutch and German is German, in Dutch duitsch is German and Nederlands is Dutch. And in Germany Dutch is Holländisch and German is Deutsch. And in France German is allemande and Hollandaise is sauce. Which you can get on French fries. In Belgium. 

It is things like this that make me long for the relative simplicity of seepage under the sub-floor. And a dutchman to smooth out the uneven spots.

By Alper Çuğun from Berlin, Germany, via Wikimedia Commons