Uncovering childhood memories (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

In the course of one's life certain words or sentences get stuck in your head, never to leave there again. You'll be repeating something you picked up when you were seven years old when you're eighty-seven and in the old folks' home.

For me these include things like EnWiAkDuFa, which was my reminder for my wednesday's schedule during my third year in high school. Or SOSCASTOA, which was a maths shortcut to the Sine-Cosine-Tangent rules. Or Zij brengt rozen op Gerrit's graf bij vies grijs weer (or translated into English Betty brings roses on Yorick's grave by vapid, grey weather), which is the engineer's shortcut to the resistor colour codes.

Two other lines that I will never forget came from the weekly Donald Duck comic magazine. For as long as I can remember my whole family's loved those strips and we've always had a subscriptin. My dad's even had a sub for most of the years that the magazine's been published in the Netherlands!

Unfortunately I had no way of tracing the quotes back to the original comics, even though I tried using Google. So I wrote a letter to Uncle Donald, asking whether his librarian could help me out. And they did! They put me on the track of the excellent I.N.D.U.C.K.S. website, which strives to index each and every Disney comic every published. Thanks to them I finally know which issues or comic books I need to hunt after ^_^

Ach en wee ben ik de klos, met mijn boog schoot ik een albatros! (Woe is me, I'm at a loss. With my bow I shot an albatros!) came from the 1966 Carl Barks classic The not-so-ancient mariner. This is of course a pun on The rime of the ancient mariner, by S.T. Coleridge.

RabarberBarbaraBarBarbarenBaardenBarbier (RhubarbBarbaraBarBarbariansBeardBarber) came from the 1991 Evert Geradts Rabarber. This was a two-page story featuring Gyro Gearloose (Willie Wortel). AFAIK, the sole basis of this comic is a dutch tongue twister, occasionally used in speech therapy.

Now! To schedule a day to dig through the piles and piles of Ducks at my dad's place ^_^ Glee!

Posted in: .i.n.d.u.c.k.s , albatros , archive , donald duck , rabarber