I learnt an interesting word from a Dutch friend today – klunen – which refers to the action of walking on the ground in ice skates, something you might do while you’re skating along a frozen canal and come to a bridge you can’t go under, either because it’s too low, or the ice under it is too thin, so you have to walk around it. This is a wonderfully specific word and I can’t think of an equivalent in English, or any other language. Can you?
Here’s an example of useage:
Onder de brug lag geen ijs, dus we moesten erlangs klunen.
There was no ice under the bridge, so we had to walk round it.
It apparently comes from Frisian, and can also mean ‘to carry one’s canoe/kayak around impassable obstacles in the water’. There’s is a word for that action in English: portage, which comes from the French porter (to carry).
Sources: Woorden.org and Wiktionary
