Cruijffiaans
Collection of sayings by Johan Cruijff
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Key Takeaways
- Cruijffiaans is the way of speaking, or a collection of sayings, made famous by Dutch association football player and coach Johan Cruijff (1947–2016), particularly "one-liners that hover somewhere between the brilliant and the banal".
- Description Cruijff grew up in a working-class environment in Amsterdam, where he developed his gogme , an Amsterdam-Jiddish word for streetwise .
- Cruijff's Amsterdam vernacular was not the generally accepted variation of the Dutch language ( Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands or ABN ), according to linguist Jan Stroop.
- Semantically, Cruijffiaans contains many tautologies and paradoxes that, while appearing mundane or self-evident, suggest a deeper level of meaning, a mysterious layer not normally attainable for the average speaker or listener.
- Other quirks, for instance, are that Cruijffiaans knows only one relative pronoun, wie .
Cruijffiaans is the way of speaking, or a collection of sayings, made famous by Dutch association football player and coach Johan Cruijff (1947–2016), particularly "one-liners that hover somewhere between the brilliant and the banal". An example is "Je moet altijd zorgen dat je één doelpunt meer scoort als de tegenstander" (You always have to make sure that you score one goal more than your opponent).
Description
Cruijff grew up in a working-class environment in Amsterdam, where he developed his gogme, an Amsterdam-Jiddish word for streetwise. After staying back twice, he left his secondary education at Frankendael High School without a diploma. Cruijff's Amsterdam vernacular was not the generally accepted variation of the Dutch language (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands or ABN), according to linguist Jan Stroop. Lexically, Cruijffiaans is noted for its syncretism of highly diverse linguistic registers, and combines a working class Amsterdam dialect and football lingo with words not frequently found in the language of football. Semantically, Cruijffiaans contains many tautologies and paradoxes that, while appearing mundane or self-evident, suggest a deeper level of meaning, a mysterious layer not normally attainable for the average speaker or listener. Syntactically, it uses the rules of Dutch grammar selectively and freely reorganizes word order. Other quirks, for instance, are that Cruijffiaans knows only one relative pronoun, wie.
Cruijff's aphorisms, neologisms, and bastardizations have proven influential, having been the subject of some ridicule, praise, and linguistic investigation. His pronouncements oscillate between pithy aphorism and "endless monologue"; Kees Fens said Cruijffiaans was an essayistic style that compares to stream of consciousness prose.
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