Not quite clean: Trailing schoon and its resonances

When words are translated from one linguistic repertoire to another, their resonances stay behind. This is a challenge for those who write in academic English while working and living in another tongue. Here, I exemplify this with stories about the Dutch word schoon . The dictionary translates schoon into English as clean , but it is not quite clean. For a start, the songs, books and other cultural resources that resonate in schoon are distinctively local. Next, the particular sites (say, waste water treatment plants) where schoon is strived for differ from their (diverse) counterparts where English is spoken and the ambition is clean . And if dirt has notoriously been defined as ‘matter out of place’, this spatial thought would never have arisen in Dutch, because vies , the most prominent antonym of schoon , is invariably visceral. Finally, in urban settings in the Netherlands, schoon stands out as an aesthetic, a moral and a hygienic ideal; knowing whether this is also true for clean would require fieldwork in English (but where, in which English?). These examples suggests that hoping to purify one’s theoretical notions of empirical filth is a monolingual delusion. For, however well-polished, English concepts will never have universal salience: they are just (a version of) English. Good academics therefore artfully, carefully, mind the gaps between different ways of knowing, acting and speaking.