No, no, no
There’s a veritable explosion of new and revamped women’s magazines in the Netherlands this year. Maybe it has always been like this and I just never noticed. I do stay off the stuff myself.
The Dutch word ‘vriendinnetjes’ (‘friends that are girls’ – friends can be of both sexes in English) was made over into ‘vriendinnen’ (friends) with a ‘yes’ replacing the ‘tjes’ part, which in Dutch makes words all cosy and familiar. They did add an extra ‘n’ to pluralise the ‘new’ word, which makes it hard to read.
It’s not very clever word play at all. When you do get the joke, it’s not particularly funny or even interesting. I’m still dying to meet the people who come up with these lame slogans.
October 13th, 2005 at 1:54 pm
Very lame indeed!
October 14th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
I wonder if they really tried to say ‘vriendinnetjes’ by the word play ‘vriendinnenyes’. I assume (i did not read the magazine) that the theme of that issue is ‘vriendinnen’, so they just formed the compound vriendinnen-yes. Like the sex-Elle or something.
But when they meant to present it as a word play (i never looked at it that way), it is really bad indeed
October 17th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
Another vote for bad compound rather than a play on ‘vriendinnetjes’ (which is generally more
‘girlfriends’ (from the guy’s perspective) than ‘girls who are friends’).
Van Kooten & de Bie wrote a pretty funny parody of this type of girls’ mag, which they called Yours, so the profile was full of stuff like ‘dat vind je in jouw Yours’.