Source — White House press conference transcript, Obama and Rutte (2014)
- Title: Press Conference with President Obama and Prime Minister Rutte of the Netherlands
- Author: transcribed remarks of Barack Obama (and Mark Rutte), White House Press Office
- Publication: whitehouse.gov (Obama administration site, preserved in the National Archives'
obamawhitehouse.archives.govmirror) - URL: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/03/25/press-conference-president-obama-and-prime-minister-rutte-netherlands
- Date: 25 March 2014 (press conference held at the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, after the Nuclear Security Summit)
- Accessed: 2026-09-02
- Type: primary — an official government transcript, the direct record behind a quotation this project found already cited (without independent verification) by both Wiktionary and Peeters (2020).
- Access method note: fetched directly (
curlwith a browser user agent) and read in full; this project did not rely on Wiktionary's or Peeters's quotation of the line without checking it against this transcript first, per this project's standing verify-before-filing fence.
Extract
Verbatim, from the transcript's record of Obama's remarks (addressing the King and people of the Netherlands after thanking Prime Minister Rutte): "I'm told there's a Dutch word that captures this spirit, which doesn't translate exactly into English. But let me say that my first visit to the Netherlands has been truly gezellig. (Laughter.)"
This exact wording matches Wiktionary's citation of the same remark verbatim (see wiktionary-gezellig.md) — a positive control on that citation. It differs in one small word from Peeters's (2020) rendering of the same line ("captures the spirit" rather than "captures this spirit") — this project treats its own direct transcript reading as authoritative for the exact wording, and records the discrepancy as evidence that secondary quotations of even a short, well-known public remark can introduce small verbatim drift, not as a claim that Peeters misquoted deliberately.
A sitting U.S. president using the word in public, unprompted by any interviewer question about Dutch culture, and explicitly framing it with the "doesn't translate exactly" untranslatability trope, is itself a notable cultural-politics data point: the word's popular "untranslatable Dutch concept" framing had reached the highest level of Anglophone public discourse by 2014 — two years before this project's benchmark 2016 hygge wave, and independent of any publishing-industry book marketing.
Gaps
- A single sentence from a single public appearance; this project has not checked whether Obama used the word on any other occasion, nor whether the line was scripted/briefed to him in advance (the framing — "I'm told there's a Dutch word..." — suggests it likely was).