Stress door een foute e-mail van de belastingen

What does “stresskip” mean in Dutch?

Stresskip is Dutch slang for someone who can’t handle pressure — literally a “stress chicken.” It’s informal and a little self-mocking: people use it about themselves as often as about others, admitting that stress hits them physically rather than staying in their head. A tax-office email, an exam, a deadline — any of it can turn someone into a stresskip for the rest of the day.

That’s exactly what happens here: one email from the belastingen (tax office) about a fine she didn’t deserve gives her een barstende koppijn — “a splitting headache,” literally a “bursting head-pain” — that lasts through the night. Dutch has synonyms built the same way: stresskikker (“stress frog”) and stresskonijn (“stress rabbit”) mean the same thing, with a different animal doing the panicking.