"Another thing I found confusing was that Ollie the Stork's gender* changed halfway throughout the series. First Ollie is designated as a woman, and then as a man. Why was that? Those kind of things happen too. There's a lot of rebuilding** going on in the world. I thought it was a nice idea that it happened to the stork, the baby deliverer. Ollie may have wanted to have a choice in the matter, because if you spend all your time delivering boys and girls, you may want to be one or the other every now and then. He's currently flying through life as a man, but maybe someday he'll be a woman again."
*The Dutch word geslacht means both gender and sex.
**This is me nitpicking over semantics so feel free to ignore this. Just like in English with "build" and "rebuild" there are several words in Dutch that imply some kind of construction, but the exact type of construction going on changes a little. Bouwen is simply to build. Herbouwen is to rebuild. The dictionary says verbouwen means to rebuild as well, but the difference between herbouwen and verbouwen is that herbouwen means to build again, while verbouwen is more limited to "to restructure" if that makes sense. Say, if you herbouw your kitchen, you're rebuilding a demolished kitchen. If you verbouw your kitchen, you're making your existing kitchen bigger or smaller. Instead of rebuilding you could also read it as restructuring or perhaps simply construction.
no subject
"Another thing I found confusing was that Ollie the Stork's gender* changed halfway throughout the series. First Ollie is designated as a woman, and then as a man. Why was that?
Those kind of things happen too. There's a lot of rebuilding** going on in the world. I thought it was a nice idea that it happened to the stork, the baby deliverer. Ollie may have wanted to have a choice in the matter, because if you spend all your time delivering boys and girls, you may want to be one or the other every now and then. He's currently flying through life as a man, but maybe someday he'll be a woman again."
*The Dutch word geslacht means both gender and sex.
**This is me nitpicking over semantics so feel free to ignore this. Just like in English with "build" and "rebuild" there are several words in Dutch that imply some kind of construction, but the exact type of construction going on changes a little. Bouwen is simply to build. Herbouwen is to rebuild. The dictionary says verbouwen means to rebuild as well, but the difference between herbouwen and verbouwen is that herbouwen means to build again, while verbouwen is more limited to "to restructure" if that makes sense. Say, if you herbouw your kitchen, you're rebuilding a demolished kitchen. If you verbouw your kitchen, you're making your existing kitchen bigger or smaller. Instead of rebuilding you could also read it as restructuring or perhaps simply construction.
Hope that helped. o/