untitled (linguistic problems)
The other day, on German radio, I heard a report about international cooperation between post-Brexit Britain and the Netherlands. All of the interviews were translated into German from English, but one could hear some English before the translation started, and the English continued in the background. One of the issues covered in the report was what the Dutch think of the Brits and what the Brits think of the Dutch. When first asked what the Dutch were like, the Brits all said things like "tulips, windmills, and wooden shoes." When asked again, after having worked together with the Dutch for a while, the Brits used the following three words to describe their partners across the North Sea: "rude, mean, cheap."
I don't actually care what the Brits think of the Dutch, or vice versa. I'm interested in those three words, rude, mean, cheap, because the middle one can mean both rude and cheap.