An Ode to the Comparatief

What a Dutch grammar lesson taught me about making meaning in life

It’s Wednesday morning. I speed biked to be on time for week one, class two of my Dutch language class at Taalhuis in de Pijp.

After I took my seat among the seven other students, the April sun came through the tall glass windows and warmed my back. My docent Johannes wrote something on the whiteboard in royal blue marker that stopped me. Three columns. Adjectief. Comparatief. Superlatief. Day two of leve A1.2 class, and we were already learning how to compare.

I looked down at my notebook. Goed. Beter. Het best. Good. Better. Best. It made me think back to French class when I was eight or so and learned bon, meilleur, le meilleur. And then, at the bottom of the page, a sentence that made the whole thing click: Amsterdam is duurder dan den Haag. Amsterdam is more expensive than The Hague.

Dan. Than. It’s one small word in combination with the “der” at the end of the adjective, and it’s doing heavy work.

No committee invented this. No singular genius sat down and decided that every human language would need a way to bridge two things through the comparatief. It just emerged. This is something our species uses across continents, across centuries, across people who will never meet because the human brain requires it.

I don’t experience warm. I experience that today is warmer than yesterday.

I don’t know I am tall. I know I am taller than my sister, shorter than my brother.

I understand things through relationship. Language knew this before I could even articulate it.

The morning after that class, I made breakfast and found a question on my tea bag: Wat maakt jou uniek? What makes you unique?

I thought about what my dad always says. He thinks I’m the most unique person he knows. And I love him for it. But his comparison set is smaller than mine now. It can’t include the Irishman I met while I lived in a Hawaii hostel who was traveling the world paycheck to paycheck, pushing himself as far as he could go from Canada to the Galapagos to Cape Town. It can’t include the hostel in Koh Phangan, full of indefinite digital nomads who made my seven months of slow travel around northern Thailand look like a long weekend trip. It can’t include the members of the Building a Second Brain community I work in, who nerd out more than me about note-taking before I even make my afternoon tea.

I used to think of shunning comparisons entirely.

That it was a thief and a trap. But Johannes’s whiteboard shifted something.

Comparison isn’t the thief of joy. When used incorrectly, it can shrink me. But at its core, it’s my brain doing what it was always going to do: making meaning.

It is building bridges to form relationships between things. Between what is big and small, cheap and expensive, normal and interesting.

So nowadays, I am extra grateful for the comparatief. I don’t know how my brain would communicate without it.

It’s the shortest distance between two ideas.

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Hello fellow learn-it-all 👋 Greetings from Amsterdam. I hope you enjoyed letter 311 from a learn-it-all. I’m going to be experimenting with the layout. Open to your thoughts and hope you enjoyed learning some little nuggets of dutch in your day, even though you probably had no yearning to ever before.

I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.

If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.

Keep on learning 😁

Tot snel 🌺 🌺

Toodles :)

Jen

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