NYCkayaker In Dutch!

[erikbaard at gmail.com]

You remind me of a painful  memory, for a vegan...Back in my omnivorous childhood I had a delicious meal at my Frisian Dutch cousins' house. I asked what it was and the happy reply was "paard." Horse. Maybe that inspired my later certification in horse care!

Another Dutch name in New York Harbor inspired one of my favorite false "just so" stories. Wallabout Bay (aka Brooklyn Navy Yard) is often said to derive from "whale about," because the mighty mammals would turn tail in the East River upon hearing the riotous rips of Hell Gate in the straight (strait too!) shot north. Actually, it comes from "Waal Bocht," or Walloons Bay, for the lowlands Francophones who homesteaded the area. That said, the name Brooklyn does not derive from  in a lease arrangement term ("bruyk leen") with the Dutch West Indies Company or an observation of "broken land"; it's simply named for a town back in the Netherlands.

But at least it *is true* that whales did frequently swim into the harbor in old times, and we can work for their return by radically improving our local ecology!

And now I sign off as one of the harbor's two known Frisians - the other being Paul Sieswerda of the Coney Island Aquarium),

Erik
(aka to eastern relatives as Erik Christiaan Frans Van der Baard) 
  
 
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

-----Original Message-----
From: bonnie13 at earthlink.net

Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:56:56 -0500 (GMT-05:00)
To:nyckayaker <NYCkayaker at rockandwater.net>
Subject: NYCkayaker In Dutch!


I wrote the word "Paerdegat" on my blog yesterday & it piqued the curiousity of a paddler in the Netherlands. I went to answer, decided to use google to at least verify that I was correctly remembering the translation "Horse Gate" that another Sebago member had told me, and stumbled across a reference that was interesting enough that I decided that the answer was worth a whole new post. 
  
http://frogma.blogspot.com/2008/02/frogma-gets-in-dutch.html


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