Yesterday I talked about courage and then about Dutch courage.

Today I’ll talk about Dutch. But I’ll start out with Dutch courage. I’ve said that it is generally held to be an insult against the Dutch, meaning the courage you only get when you have a few drinks inside you. I mentioned the first citation in the OED as being from Sir Walter Scott in 1826.

Walter Scott wrote a story called Woodstock, or the Cavalier and it was a story about how King Charles II was trying to evade the forces of Oliver Cromwell.

For those who never studied this stuff or have forgotten: this was a time in England just a while after Shakespeare when King Charles’s father—also Charles—had had his head chopped off (after a fair trial and according to the wishes of parliament).

This is the “history is written by the victors” version of events and you might imagine that royalists disagreed.

In any case Charles II was on the run and Sir Walter Scott had him fictionally holed up in a place called Woodstock.

There is an old story about this real place Woodstock that tells of how when the representatives of the parliamentary government were taking inventory of the dead king’s possessions, a ghost or demon haunted them every night until they ran away.

The running away part at least appears to be a true story and it got woven into Walter Scott’s tale. There he has the government representatives getting fidgety about the haunted house and taking Dutch courage to calm their nerves.

What this tells us is that Dutch courage must have been a phrase already well understood by Scott’s readers since he doesn’t give much explanation of it. I see though that in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary that the first citation for Dutch courage is not the OED‘s 1826 but instead 1807.

Have patience with the OED since this entry hasn’t yet churned through the scrutiny of the third edition.

But what it does tell us about the OED is that the earlier editors did bring their opinions to work with them. The dictionary isn’t a document entirely devoid of cultural bias.

The fact is that the reason Sir Walter Scott represents the first citation for Dutch courage in the OED is the OED editors thought highly of Walter Scott.

They did not assign their volunteer readers to examine every piece of inferior writing looking for this phrase, or any other. They were on a mission to present the English language as written by the best of English language communicators.

That’s part of the reason they didn’t find the earlier 1807 reference.

That and the fact that they didn’t have computers or Google Book Search to do finds on all those old documents.

But all this tells you nothing about the etymology of Dutch, which is why you’re listening, so I’ll tell you.

Today we think of Dutch as referring to the people of Holland also known as the Netherlands.

When the word Dutch first shows up in English in 1380 it didn’t actually restrict itself to this geographic location. If you have ever heard a German refer to their own country in their own language you may have been struck that it sounds kind of like the word Dutch; Deutschland.

No coincidence.

In Middle English there was High Dutch and Low Dutch. We now call the High Dutch Germans and the Low Dutch Dutch.

It meant “people” or “nation” since everyone who has a choice calls themselves “people,” and everyone else something else. For instance Welsh means “foreigners.”