Rapper Romeijn spoke to his youngest son in the city of Groningen. The artist had a new song, ‘This is life’, started conversations about it on the street and filmed it in the hope of nice quotes for social media for promotion.
That didn’t go well with his son, because a small debate arose about the English translation of ‘This is life’, with which the not much older rapper opened the conversation with the youngest.
The unexpectedness of the moment made his son doubt whether it was indeed the hip-hop artist. After all, you weren’t often approached by a famous Dutch person on the street in the city.
When his son shared his doubts with a few friends, one of them responded: “If he looks like Romeijn and talks like Romeijn, then he’s probably Romeijn.”
I recently learned that this way of reasoning is called the ‘duck test’. Coined by Richard Patterson, ambassador to Guatemala in the 1950s, to defend his claim that President Guzmán’s regime was communist.
His statement: If something looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.
It reminded a colleague of a statement by the Austrian psychologist and thinker Sigmund Freud: ” Sometimes it’s just a cigar .” In other words: not everything has a deeper meaning.
Then I thought of René Magritte’s painting of a pipe, with the caption: ‘This is not a pipe.’ By which the artist means, at least if I understand correctly: everything is n ot always what it is.
Well, that’s how we keep each other busy.
Tags: Youngest son doubts friend Romeijn talks Romeijn Romeijn column Herman Sandman
