Hans Brinker re-redux
He keeps coming to my attention by a kind of serial serendipity. Jaap de Berg wrote in the language column of Trouw basically what I wrote in 2008, prompted by a news item in another paper about President Obama: “as if he were a modern-day Hansje Brinker, able to do heroic work with one finger kilometers under water”. Here is a link; may not persist, may disappear behind a paywall after some finite amount of time, may be behind a paywall even now. If you can’t see the article and you want to read it (in Dutch, of course), please communicate.
This made me look up the Wikipedia article, which turns out to be surprisingly good and complete. And of course, there’s a non-zero chance that the boy with his finger in the dike —if, which I doubt, he existed at all— was also called Hans, or rather Hannes.
(Also, a student wants to quote my names deconstruction; recognition at last!)
Posted: 02-Jun-2010 | /words/reading | link | 0 comments



