So, I’m sitting on the hotel room floor leaning against the bed while I plow through the day’s emails, ’cause my back is killing me–getting old sucks. I have the TV on for background noise, none of which I understand, ’cause the station is in Dutch, which I don’t speak. I get up to stretch and look at the screen, where I see that what I’ve been listening to for the past two hours is clearly an extended advertisement for phone sex–either that, or cute Dutch girls lounging around on beds in their underwear with phones in their hands are used in these parts for selling some product that I can’t begin to imagine. Really? They still have that, with the Internet around?? I wonder how you say “phone sex” in French…
The World Congress on Research Integrity brings me to Amsterdam, and the long Ascension Day weekend (in our very secular République, why are so many of our national holidays Catholic? I have no clue) gave me a couple extra days to hang out beforehand. Amsterdam means lots of vocabulary related to water and what to do about it, including the hyper-cool le polder, which I know I will get exactly zero chances to ever use again in my life, but which was too cool to pass up memorizing. Also, téléphone rose, which apparently still exists here, despite the avènement (I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but I love that word) of the aforementioned Internet.
Zipf's Law 
Have you heard of “le Minitel”? It was an ancestor of the internet that French engineers had created : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel . From 1982 to 2000 it was a big thing in France. I mention it because the “minitel rose” was immensely popular in France, far more than the “téléphone rose”, and gave birth to many jokes .
About catholic holydays the pressure from the working class met the will of the catholic hierarchy . You must know that any work done on holydays or sundays gives by law the right to a superior wage, so a stream from the left and a stream from the right when united triggered a powerful strength .
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Next to the polders you could check the terpen https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terp
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Wow, nice one–thanks! I navigated from your page to the French one, and got this:
Un terp (du néerlandais, pluriel terpen, en allemand Warft) désigne une élévation artificielle construite par l’homme afin d’accueillir un habitat protégé de l’eau et en particulier du mouvement des marées dans les plaines littorales. En France, ces monticules sont appelés des Martignys.
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