My mother has been obsessed with language from an early age: according to tradition, she was already improving relatives as a toddler, and once she became an adult, she became a teacher of Dutch to do something constructive with that correction compulsion. She taught generations of students the ‘kofschip’, at home the Onze Taal tear-off calendar hung on every floor and she laughed when we went to school with the family. Ten for Language overlooked participants who did not know how to spell obsessive-compulsive disorder. In addition, for years she was also the brain behind the Groot Oldenzaals Dictee, which is why my brother and I called her the Great Dicteetor behind her back. So when I got a call one beautiful autumn morning asking if I wanted to participate in the Groot Dictee der Nederlandse Taal this year, I said yes, but of course on one condition.
When I told my dad, he almost laughed out of his chemo. My mother reacted a little less enthusiastically.
“Hey, why did you give up on me too, how incredibly stupid,” she said, but at the same time her eyes were already sparking with fanaticism. In recent weeks, she spent every free hour on the website of Onze Taal, double-checking the spelling of loan words such as chunky or antivaxer, and also summarized the Green Book.
“You should also do some dictations in advance,” she said. “It will look bad on me if my own child gets three hundred wrong.”
I replied that I intended to write the entire dictation phonetically, after which she stopped responding to my texts for two days. Saturday it was time. She came in nervously, with every step she shrank inches from the stress and shuffled nervously past several famous Dutch people.
“I am so impressed,” she stammered.
“Because of whom?” I asked. “Frits Spits? Janne Schra? Hubert Bruls?”
“No man, act normal,” she hissed. “There she is, don’t you recognize her?”
She pointed to a lady who looked unfamiliar to me.
‘That’, my mother whispered in awe, ‘is the director of the Genootschap Onze Taal. Don’t stare!”
Reluctantly, she took a seat at her table. For a moment I thought she was staying in it, but she managed to relax, and the dictation itself was not that bad.
“I only got seven wrong”, she exulted afterwards. “Only four more than the winner!”
I proudly showed her my result: fourteen.
“Well,” she said economically, “you are your father’s child, after all.”
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 9, 2021
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