‘Animal friendly meat’ most hated phrase this year: poll

The most hated Dutch expression of 2016 is ‘diervriendelijk vlees’ or animal friendly meat, according to a poll conducted by the Institute for the Dutch Language.

Some 22,000 people from both the Netherlands and Belgium voted in the annual ‘Down with that word!’ poll. Of them, 32% opted for ‘diervriendelijk vlees’ closely followed by a 30% vote for the ungrammatical ‘hun hebben’

Meat can never be animal friendly, voters pointed out. It can at the most be ‘animal friendlier’, a term launched by the Dutch association for the protection of animals in an effort to improve life for animals used for food.  The term made the top 10 in earlier polls, as did ‘me’ (as in ‘me moeder’ instead of ‘mijn moeder’), ‘kids’ and ‘oudjes’ (oldies).

‘Groentjes’, apparently a term used for vegetables in Flanders, came in fourth place. 6% of the Belgian voters found the diminutive use of the word extremely annoying.