I haven’t seen this in the American news except as a brief banner on CNN. But apparently someone got some preschool-age kids, at a daycare center, into some sort of game in which several died. (Dutch link here). My Dutch isn’t that good, but with the help of my far better German, and being a native speaker of English, I can usually make out the sense of news stories–especially the rather short ones in the Algemeen Dagblad.
It’s not clear to me what the man was doing there, since other stories mention he was unemployed. He wasn’t a teacher obviously. But what exactly is a “steekpartij”? Babelfish translates it as “twinge party”, but I don’t know what that is either. Apparently a knife is involved, but what was meant by “steekpartij” is unclear.
I know we’ve got some people here who can clear this up in a trice.
Maybe ‘creche’ or ‘nursery’ are being translated into twinge. In any case, it seems that some psychotic man attacked kids and workers at daycare, with a knife.
If you’re wondering about the daycare centre massacre in Belgium, there’s a current [thread=503243]Pit thread[/thread] about this. You didn’t hear much about it in the US?
ETA: I don’t know Dutch and have no idea what “steekpartij” means.
Steekpartij translates the best as stabbing (steek) party (party)
It means an incident where there was stabbing, like a “vechtpartij” means an incident where there was fighting.
partij means incident here, not an actual party with hats
So what actually happened there in Dendermonde was that some twenty-year-old guy with black and white make-up on his face walked into a daycare center with a bunch of knives and started stabbing indiscriminately, killing one of the employees and two babies, injuring more. He was apprehended swiftly.
We have not found out much more ever since; the guy refuses to speak and he has now started a hunger and thirst strike. Was the make-up on his face an imitation of the joker? We don’t know. Police have found, however, out that he had a note on him with the addresses to another two day-care centers.
It’s a damn shame I’m devoting my 500th post to something this sad.
When I heard he had black and white make-up I thought of a mime artist( especially with the remaining silent part), but are people now making connections to the recent Batman movie?
I just heard on studio brussel (Belgium radio) that Kim de Gelder is now a suspect in the murder of a 73 year old woman in Beveren, exactly a week before
Sounds like the equivalent of a “stab-fest” or something the NY Post would put in a headline; a non-native speaker could read it and wonder what sorts of festivals feature stabbings.
Just to make sure: ‘steekpartij’ is a completely neutral term that just means ‘stabbing’ without any of the goriness implied in ‘stabfest’. The word ‘partij’ can be a ‘political’ party or a load of goods, but not in the first place a celebration (that’s ‘feest’)- although a kids’ party can be referred to as ‘een partijtje’ but not ‘een partij’: it needs the diminutive ‘-tje’.
No, a spree is when you go and stab or kill or maim or whatever a whole bunch of people in one sitting. When you just stab one person, it’s not a stabbing spree, but we do call it a steekpartij. Steekpartij is just a stabbing, that’s it.