You're at dinner with your friends on Sunday and the waiter comes up to you and says," Is this going to be on one check or-"
＂Separate!" you all said, barely taking a breath to pause from your conversation.
And why would you? It's pretty usual to pay for your own meal, or to go Dutch.
But it wasn't always the custom to split the check when going out with friends. In fact, in early English society, it was seen as selfish to invite someone out to eat and not pay for their meal. The origins of the phrase" going Dutch" are a little complicated, but Steven Pincus, a historian from the University of Chicago who focuses on carly modern Europe, helped us track the complex history of this idiom.
We have to take it back all the way to the 1600s. During the Anglo-Dutch Wars, there were multiple conflicts between the English and the Dutch over trade and naval power. That led to a rise in idioms from the English regarding their enemy, the Dutch: phrases like" Dutch courage, "the false courage brought on by alcohol; or" Dutch reckoning, "which is a ridiculously high bill on which you've likely been cheated. This was because the English saw the Dutch not only as a trading enemy, but also as a people with questionable morals. The English" claimed that the Dutch had been completely corrupted by their commitment to capitalism. "(Funny how tides change, isn't it?)
Of course, as time changes, so does our sense of self. After all, who wants to pay for their friends' meals all the time? Maybe sometimes it's all right to do like the Dutch do.
