The Andersonville Round Table

[muckefuck]

Sorry to all and sundry who couldn't reach me Saturday night. I was happily esconced in Hopleaf, a gemoedelijk bar, but almost too noisy to carry on a conversation, much less hear a phone ring in. I should've recorded somewhere the beers we had, since almost every name was unfamiliar. lhn had a Lindemans lambic, but one (the apple-flavoured Pommes) I'd never seen before. Leffe is the only one of innerdoggie's beers that I can recall right now. I started off with Weissbier, but from the unfamiliar Bavarian König Ludwig brand, and continued the royal theme by ordering a Belgian de Koninck.

Their motto--"Maak eens 'n afspraak met de Koninck"--caused some consternation, mainly since no one recognised the word "afspraak". My knowledge of Dutch is almost entirely a by-product of my knowledge of German, and Absprache is not in my active vocabulary. Working from absprechen, however, I eventually came up with "Make an agreement with the King." Upon further examination, "consultation" seems to be the closest equivalent, but that makes for more awkward English than "appointment". The "eens" seems to be there only to soften the imperative, but that's mainly a hunch based on the use of (ein)mal in German. (Any of y'all Nederlandstaligen can improve on the translation, please do.)

That's what I love about my good friends: I leave every conversation full of questions. Who enforced the Reinheitsgebot? Is mead the earliest alcoholic beverage or is it beer? Where is "concrete" usual for what we St. Louisans call "frozen custard"? Is there an "As Seen On TV" store in the Chicago area and, if so, where is it? What goes into "fumitory water"? The bar actually has a reference shelf with the 200th anniversary edition of the EB and the Oxford Companion to Food, so you better believe both were consulted during the course of the evening's drinking--and, sadly, found wanting.

At the end of the evening, we tried to come up with common idioms grounded in rural life which would be difficult to decipher for digital natives and we pretty much stumped. One did occur to me on the way home, however: My high-school trigonometry teacher was a colourful old coot from Arkansas named Mr Lavelle. He was a font of folksy sayings; I remember best his unaffected use of "Sam Hill" (and his protestations that the second word was definitely "Hill" and not "Hell"), but at least once he also said "what we have here is a clod in the churn". He was talking about a tricky bit of a trig equation, but the expression he used is going to be clear as mud to someone who's never heard of churning milk to get butter.

A Googling of this phrase pulls up this page of colourful colloquialisms. The only one among them that really fits the bill is "She's been rode hard and put up wet!" The second part's a mite obscure if you don't know a thing about horses, isn't it?

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Isn't "afspraak" the insurance company with the duck?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

It would be appropriate, since another prominently featured Belgian draft beer at Hopleaf was Kwak. (Which Hopleaf serves in a fairly remarkable glass.)