Sadie Stein has an amusing and sobering (for us book hoarders) piece in the NY Times (archived) that begins:
When Grandpa Moe died, it took months and several rented skips to clear out the piles of rotted paper and the millions of printed words left behind. About a thousand books were salvageable. A guy my grandfather had met somewhere came and picked these up, and made them into “Moe’s Bookmobile” — a sort of performance-art-piece-cum-public-service that was, we all felt, very much in Moe’s spirit.
That spirit could be summed up in the slogan “So many books, so little time.” Indeed, the first time my grandfather saw these words, on a faded mug in the Goodwill’s homewares section, he was as electrified as a man encountering divine golden tablets. Here, in red Comic Sans, was his life philosophy.
Whether rooted in his unconventional childhood, his engineering training or something more mysterious, Grandpa Moe’s reading habits were … bizarre. He read incessantly, fanatically and promiscuously. He read, terrifyingly, behind the wheel of his jalopy; he read, constantly, against a corduroy Dutch Husband in a corrugated “book shed” — probably a valiant attempt by his wife to keep the chaos at bay — in his yard; he read multiple volumes at once, one in each hand, while he watched procedurals in his bedroom.
Did he “love to read”? Did he savor the smell of books? Almost certainly not; after a few California winters, most of his library just smelled like mildew and rats. The point — if there was one — seemed to be to cram in as many books as possible before meeting the nothingness his militant atheism mandated; his reading was frenzied and restless.
She goes on to talk about “opting for a touch of self-care: after a lifetime of climbing, I’m happy to stop and just enjoy the view,” but of course I’m fixated on Moe. I read a lot, but not — I think — “incessantly, fanatically and promiscuously.” Still, I’ll be leaving a lot of books for my heirs and assigns to deal with. What’s bothering me at the moment, however, is the phrase “Dutch Husband.” Neither my wife nor I was familiar with it; Urban Dictionary tells me it is “a long, usually rectangular shaped body pillow,” but it barely seems to exist in that sense — the vast majority of the hits are for actual husbands (“You want to find a Dutch husband, there are living millions Dutch husbands here”). Anybody familiar with the phrase and its history? (I also don’t think “husband” should be capitalized, but that’s on the Times copyediting staff, if they still have one.)
Looks like this is a gender-swapped version of “Dutch wife”. Why? Dunno.
Actually, on a hunch, I tried an image search for “husband pillow” and it looks like that’s probably more what the writer has in mind. I’d call it a “reading pillow.” It’s an upright bolster with armlets on either side. It’d be suitable for providing back support while sitting up on a couch or in bed.
I’m familiar with the word “husband” for a backrest pillow with arms used for sitting up in bed, often to read (which seems to fit the use in the article better than the Urban Dictionary definition). I don’t think I’ve seen “Dutch” attached to it.
Yes, I think the author confused a husband pillow with a Dutch wife: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_wife. Speaking of personified objects one sleeps with, I still smile whenever I look at the old bedwarming device that was in this house when we moved in and that has now become a footrest. In Italian it’s a “prete.”
It’s an upright bolster with armlets on either side.
Hot damn !! I’ve been wanting to get one of those for a long while, but didn’t know what to call it so’s I could search the ‘net for one. Seems it’s called Rückenkissen here.
Rückenkissen = backrest pillow. See the second photo in the first row of four here:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=backrest+pad
i’ve definitely heard “dutch husband” for a backrest-with-arms reading pillow (i wouldn’t call one just a “husband”, though i’ve heard that too). not, i think, in my upbringing, but before large-scale internet commerce – maybe from college friends (an unhelpfully regionally-mixed group). and i’ve got no guesses about how nederlanders entered the phrase, or even whether it’s that kind of [english] dutch or the german kind.
These were popular among the women in my co-ed dorm, ca. 1980, but they were always called “husbands,”
without any reference to the Dutch.
Thanks, all!
Being a Dutch husband myself, I need some time to get used to this new identity. It looks like a pretty comfortable pillow though, so something positive unlike most constructions with Dutch.
The National Lampoon, in a parody of low-budget Red Scare and other conspiracy literature, did a bunch of cartoons and intentionally badly-written essays about the Dutch Menace in America (here), referencing every negative “Dutch” idiom in the English language. It was funny but the Dutch embassy was not amused, and NL lost their Heineken ads.
I remember that issue! It made me cackle… thirty years ago?!
Fifty.
Oh god. And I Tiresias have foresuffered all…
I was vaguely familiar with Dutch husband, and I don’t remember ever hearing one referred to as just a “husband.” I figured it was just another one of those mildly anti-Dutch slurs, where “Dutch X” means something that is not an X at all.
Since in older American English the word Dutch also meant ‘German’ (as in “the Pennsylvania Dutch,” which has by now been largely replaced by “the Pennsylvania Germans” precisely because many people mistakenly took the phrase to mean ‘the Pennsylvania Netherlanders’), one should not assume that every lexeme containing the word “Dutch” (such as “Dutch uncle” and “Dutch husband”) must have originally meant ‘Netherlander’.
Sadie Stein: “meeting the nothingness his militant atheism mandated”
I disagree with Stein’s perspective of Moe’s view. If Moe’s atheism was militant, it was militant in the way that those defending themselves against an attack are militant. And whatever Grandpa Moe’s views on death, atheism doesn’t mandate them. It’s religion that attacks and mandates.
Oh, spare me. I’m sick of Dawkinsoid rants about the eeeevils of religion and the pure goodness and rationalism of those poor beleaguered atheists. I suggest you take a look at the history of the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia, among other places, and think long and hard about the matter. (Note: I am an atheist, though I rarely used the word for fear of being taken for a Dawkinsoid.)
one should not assume that every lexeme containing the word “Dutch” (such as “Dutch uncle” and “Dutch husband”) must have originally meant ‘Netherlander’.
And one does not; as rozele said (January 24, 2023 at 4:27 pm): “i’ve got no guesses about how nederlanders entered the phrase, or even whether it’s that kind of [english] dutch or the german kind.”
“Dutch” meaning “German” in our previous discussion of Pippinid mafiosi.
Is this the same Sadie Stein, offering to help people with the opposite problem (i.e. not enough books hoarded in their living quarters)? https://www.elledecor.com/life-culture/a33484702/sadie-stein-sos-libraries/
Presumably!
Ms. Stein sez in the interview:
This is a moment when people are really committing to their homes and the books in them—making their personal libraries as rich and beautiful and useful as possible. You can find almost any book online, if you know what you want—but it has never been harder for the right book to find you.
“It has never been harder for the right book to find you” – what does that even mean ? “Making their personal libraries as rich and beautiful and useful as possible” – a sales pitch to those upper middle class people who have a bad conscience about making money and playing golf instead of reading books. A few notches farther up the financial scale, one need no longer pretend that the books must be useful.
I see waterproof impregnated low-fat copies of the Très riches heures in every crapper. They are useful in reminding visitors of how well-off their hosts are.
Declare Marxism or at least Leninism a religion, and the philosophical problem is solved.
There is no philosophical problem, only a problem of people wanting their side to be the Good Guys and the other side to be the Bad Guys.
Dawkins starts by equating atheism with reason and religion with unreason – he means reason but wants to call it atheism. That works as long as all unreason can be called religion.
See my previous comment.
Tantum irreligio potuit suadere malorum. (It even scans.)