Today’s Prompt: Pick up the nearest book and flip to page 29. What’s the first word that jumps off the page? Use this word as your springboard for inspiration. Write the post in the form of a letter.

Dear uitgeblazen,

In English, you are being translated as “has been blown out”. It could be in the context of blowing out a candle (or fire) or blowing out your last breath when you die. Basically, it’s blowing air out of your lungs, but it does not represent a sigh.

Now, because you have “ge” in that word, it means that all that blowing happened in the past. Otherwise, you could appear in the form of uitblazen or opblazen or if used in a sentence, you completely transform yourself to something else in the way you are being used with a different spelling altogether: Ik (meaning I) blaas uit and in another form, Ik blaas het kaarsje uit (I blow the candle out).

That’s because you are considered as a “separable word”, which means 2 words put together that can be separated depending on the context you are being used. Of course, the form and spelling would change again if you are being used with personal pronouns as in Ik (I), Jij (You), Wij (We), Hij (He) or Zij (She).

You are one horrible Dutch word, you; along with your other crazy cohorts like afwassen (washing dishes), uitdraaien (turn off the gas or another word use for printing), opzetten (put something on top of something else or turn on them music but NOT for TV)…in which you would use aanzetten (to turn something on like the TV) to name the crazy few.

In any other circumstance, I would probably pick up an English book – but because I am currently now in Holland and the nearest book I could find was a Dutch book, you somehow stood out amongst the rest of the complicated Dutch language on page 29.

Uitgeblazen, you just blew my head off. Just when I thought I “get it”, you changed again and confused the hell out of my tiny, little, piddly brains. And apparently, I can’t use you if I want to construct a sentence that says something in the line of blowing my head off. Because, in the Dutch language, that’s just not the way it is being used.

Great. More rules. Which genius invented all the horrible, inconsistent rules in the language?

Thank you for the unnecessary confusion you have caused.  I look forward to all the other curve balls your friends have in store and making the mastery of your excellent, complicated language an almost impossible challenge to handle. You drive me crazy.

It’s a great idea of fun. No argument there. No. Really.

Yours sincerely,

Me.

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