Monthly Archives: November 2004

Shake and Freeze

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The oddest thing for an inhabitant of Poland to be writing: we had an earthquake yesterday at around 6:20 in the evening.

Completely unrelated, but I got hits from Google yesterday with someone looking for “bridal tracksuit” and “wedding tracksuit.” Looks like someone’s got class.

It was a slight little hiccup by most standards: 3.6 on the Richter scale. Kinga was at home and said she felt the building shaking for about five seconds. I, on the other hand, was walking home and felt nothing. Reportedly in the nearest town, some houses were shaken enough that books fell from the shelves, and on the other side of the Tatra Mountains, Slovakians reported having felt it.

No reports of damage, but of course everyone’s talking about it.

Earthquake and Poland — they go together about as well as . . .

#$*@!

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Ah #&@*, I did it again — trying to stop cursing and let another one loose unconsciously.

Without the redundant profanity (a sorry attempt at a joke), that’s what I thought last night when something irritating happened and, muttering to myself about it, I used “colorful” language.

Stopping cursing is about like stopping smoking, I’d imagine. Perhaps more difficult from a certain point of view — you don’t have to buy profanities. They’re there, piled up in our heads, for free! And you never run out of them, so you can’t really think to yourself, “As long as I don’t stop by a convenience store and see a wall of cigarettes, I’m fine.”

My parents tell the story of when my father was trying to stop cursing, he and my mother set up a system that each profanity cost some part of their weekly spending money. They were a young couple, and the purse strings were tight, so they allotted themselves only a few dollars a week as personal spending money. My father “spent” all his money and then some one afternoon waiting for, if I remember correctly, a “woman driver” to turn left.

What is it about profanity that has such a draw? It’s so difficult to stop, and yet so easy to begin. You can sit with an infant, patiently trying to teach her how to say something — anything — and she, with stubborn resoluteness, sits and says nothing. Then you hear the soup boil over, exclaim something you shouldn’t, and when you come back a second later, the infant is chanting your profanity.

It’s not that children have an ear for the vulgarities of their own language. An acquaintance told my wife and me that her daughter has recently begun using “the ‘f’ word” because — guess. It’s a word that has no meaning in Polish, though it does sound like “Kwak,” a somewhat common surname.

Nonetheless, there she was, running around the apartment saying, well, the obvious.

When I moved to Boston after having spent three years in Poland, I began muttering Polish profanity — and it is a language rich in profanity — at work when something was trying my patience. Then a Pole started working there.

In Polska, cursing is strangely culturally accepted. That’s not to say that it’s universally practiced, for if everyone cursed, then it would cease to be profanity. Still, in the States someone out “in public” doesn’t usually let the four-letter words fly at will. A bus driver, for example, wouldn’t be sprinkling is conversation with a passenger with profanity, but here, it’s a common occurrence. I’ve heard fathers let loose while their four-year-old daughters stand beside them, grandfathers going crazy while their five-year-old grandsons run around at their feet — and then it’s no wonder that you hear a five year old say the Polish equivalent of, “Hey, *#@$-for-brains, where they *#@! are you going?”

Why did I write *#@$ rather than “shit?” It’s always amused me to read quotes in something like Sports Illustrated where instead of quote the pitcher verbatim, puts words like s*$# in his mouth. As if we don’t know what it means, and, more importantly, as if we don’t sound the word in our heads as we read it. Is “shit” any worse than *#@$ for conveying the same idea? It’s even gotten to the point that without any context, we have a pretty good idea what *#@$ means, so what’s the point?

I’m not sure if it’s the rural environment, or Polish culture in general, but one does hear much more “in public” than one hears in the States. In stores, in bus stops, on the streets — it’s everywhere. In Polish, it’s not “the ‘f’ word” but rather “the ‘k’
word” and it’s shocking — almost impressive — to hear how many times a riled up Polish man of, say, twenty-five, can use “the ‘k’ word” in a sentence.

Perhaps it’s a question of American culture’s Puritan roots. After all, there are advertisements for soap in Europe that show women’s breasts — unthinkable in the States.

I’m curious about other cultures — how is cursing viewed wherever you sit reading this?

The See-Saw

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I try to be tolerant. I try not to make blanket statements about an entire group of people. I try not to make crude comments about people’s religious beliefs, social customs, etc. I try to be a bleeding heart, I guess.

Sometimes, I feel the little xenophobe in me (and there is one, buried deep inside) wiggling his way out and making me think things like, “Stupid barbarians.”

A fourteen year old being whipped to death because he broke the Ramadan fast is one of those incidents that is just fodder for my smoldering xenophobia.

“Barbarians,” some are calling them. “A ‘religion’ of hate,” others are saying. “A country ruled by terrorists,” still others are accusing. And the little conservative in me that I fight to keep down when I hear things like that mutters, “The judge, the executioner, and all who stood around cheering deserve the same.”

“The vast majority of Muslims are peaceful,” is the common refrain among us bleeding hearts.

“Explain the lack of outcry among other Muslims about this event,” says the Little Xenophobe I keep on a very short leash.

“Yes, but the townspeople were outraged by this,” says Bleeding Heart. “The article says so!”

“They were only outraged that he died, I’m sure. If he’d received a more ‘moderate’ punishment, like, say, five or ten lashes, they’d approve,” says LX.

“That’s just conjecture. You’re generalizing from one event,” replies BH.

“One event? Look at the Muslim ‘faith.’ It’s blatantly misogynistic; it rules by the sword; it converts by the sword; it’s brutal . . .” begins LX.

“Yes, but most Muslims . . .” interrupts BH.

It’s a never-ending cycle.

What sorts of LX/BH dialogues do you have rattling around your head?

In synagogue Saturday

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My wife and I spent the weekend in Krakow. Saturday we went for a stroll in Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter.

As I’ve mentioned before, Jews in Poland occupy a strange position. There are very few left in Poland today, and that’s why we were able to find ourselves in an old synagogue on a Saturday.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I thought.

“This should still be in use. We should feel as if we’re intruding, coming into the Jewish quarter on a Saturday as bumbling tourists.”

Politely Declining (Or “Why Polish is really a nightmare”)

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I recently wrote about Polish plurals and the strange fact that there are two forms.

That was only the tip of the iceberg. The easy part of the language. Today — how to make a Polish sentence meaningful. Or “how to make sure you say ‘The dog bit John’ rather than ‘John bit the dog.’”

In English, word order is an essential grammatical element. We know in the sentence “The dog bit John” that the dog did the biting, and not John, from the position of “The dog” in the sentence.

Polish, however, is an inflected language and that means that word order has no effect on the meaning of the sentence. In Polish, you could just as easily order the words, “John bit the dog” without any change in meaning. For that matter, “Bit John the dog” and “The dog John bit” are possible as well.

So how are they differentiated? By their ending. In Polish (in all highly inflected languages) you indicate a word as a direct object, an indirect object, a subject, or whatever by adding a suffix according to a given pattern.

An example may help. Imagine in English that subjects ended in “-doj” and direct objects ended in “-aldi.” Our sentence would then look like this: “The dogdoj bit Johnaldi.” In that case, “Bit Johnaldi the dogdoj” would have the same meaning, as would the following:

  • “Johnaldi bit the dogdoj.”
  • “Johnaldi the dogdoj bit.”
  • “The dogdoj Johnaldi bit.”

English does indeed have a bit of declension. Some examples:

  • “-ed” to a verb to make it past tense
  • “-s” to make a noun plural
  • “-ing” to make a verb a gerund (i.e., “Swimming is a healthy activity.”)
  • “-er” and “-est” in the comparative and superlative forms
  • “-’s” to denote possession (i.e., “Samantha’s mother left for Switzerland.”)

By and large, though, English is not an inflected language. “The dog bit John” and “John bit the dog” are very different sentences as a result.

Thanks to Oliver for the correction. Originally I’d mistakenly claimed that German has five cases.

An inflected language uses cases to differentiate functions and forms. Greek and German have four cases.

Polish has seven:

  • Nominative case — The subject of a sentence
  • Accusative case — The direct object of a positive sentence
  • Genitive case — To denote possession (i.e., “That’s George’s bag.”)
    • The direct object of a positive sentence for some verbs
    • The direct object of a negative sentence
    • For quantities of five and above.
  • Locative case — To specify location after certain prepositions
  • Instrumental case — To denote the method or tool used to do something
  • Dative case — The indirect object of a sentence
  • Vocative case — Used in addressing people (i.e., Did you take it, George?)

These changes even occur to _names_, providing a clear example of the complexities of Polish grammar. We’ll use “Bill Clinton” as a direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, etc, and see just how insane Polish is:

Case Example
Nominative case To jest Bill Clinton. (This is Bill Clinton.)
Accusative case Lubię Billa Clintona. (I like Bill Clinton.)
Genitive case Szukam Billa Clintona. (I’m looking for Bill Clinton.)
Locative case Myślę o Billu Clintonie. (I’m thinking about Bill Clinton.)
Instrumental case Rozmawiam z Billem Clintonem. (I’m talking with Bill Clinton.)
Dative case Dałem Billowi Clintonowi. (I gave Bill Clinton… _s’thing_.)
Vocative case Wziąłeś, Billu? (Did you take it, Bill?)

Because of declension, the word order doesn’t make any difference. For example, if you want to stress that you gave it to Bill as opposed to George, you could say, with the proper vocal inflection to stress it, “Billowi dałem.”

But learning Polish grammar is not simply a matter of remembering some endings, for all nouns in Polish have a gender (as in German, French, Spanish, etc.), so you have to learn a hell of a lot of endings.

  • Three genders
  • Seven cases
  • Singular and plural

So when you utter a Polish noun, there are forty-two possible endings, depending on whether it’s singular or plural, masculine, feminine or neuter, and whichever case is necessary.

And the exceptions, for some forms are exactly the same except in given cases.

  • The accusative plural and the nominative plural of neuter nouns are identical, but feminine and masculine nouns are different.
  • The female genitive and locative cases are the same for singular nouns but not for plural nouns.

Aside from that nonsense, there are various considerations for exceptions. Is it a masculine alive noun? Does it end in “a”?

Shopping in Rural Poland

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is a little different than its American counterpart. We’re used to express lanes and in-and-out shopping. In some supermarkets now, you can theoretically do all your shopping without interacting with a single employee. Just swipe your ATM card at the self-check-out and off you go.

Not so in rural Poland.

Until recently, even the notion of a self-service shop was unknown. Shops were organized like the old general stores we see in westerns: a counter, with all the goods on one side behind the owner, with you on the other.

Such was the setup in Poland when I first arrived. I went to the store and instead of shopping, told the shopkeeper what I wanted, and she ran around behind the counter gathering my purchases. It was strange at first, but excellent for my early language acquisition.

There are more and more self-service shops in Poland these days, and virtually all the shops in larger towns and cities are self-service.

But the old mentality lingers:

  • Some older women have a habit of doing their shopping as they check-out, so they bring a few items, then continually run through the store, getting this and that, while I stand, all my items in the basket, waiting.
  • Some much older women ask the cashier to run around the shop doing their shopping for them. Old habits, I guess.

Despite its inconvenience, I miss the old shops. You had to interact while you were shopping, and as a foreigner, the more the better.

I’m not anti-Semitic but . . .

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“I’m not anti-Semitic, but I just don’t trust Jews.”

I was sitting in a bar with an American friend and a Polish acquaintance when the Pole, in utmost seriousness, said that. He could not be made to see the inherent contradiction in what he’d said.

“I don’t really know many Jews, but I don’t like them.”

Thus said another Pole to me, explaining a situation he’d had earlier that week in Krakow with someone who was “obviously a Jew.” He too maintained he’s not anti-Semitic.

Jews in Poland occupy a strange position. Before the Holocaust, “Poland’s Jewish community numbered 3.5 million, which represented 20 per cent of world Jewry and 10 per cent of the pre-war Polish population.” (Source) Today, Jews number less than twenty thousand in the whole country. Most people in modern Poland have never even met a Jew.

There were so many Jews in Poland thanks to Casimir the Great’s opening the borders and accepting Jews in the Middle Ages when they were being expelled from many other countries in Europe. When they began prospering, the Poles began resenting them and their success.

Contemporary anti-Semitism in Poland is fueled by far-right parties like “Liga Polskich Rodzin” (“The League of Polish Families”) and the populist party “Samoobrona” (“Self-Defense”), both of which overtly and covertly blame Poland’s present economic woes on Jews. They deny that there are only about sixteen or so thousand Jews in Poland, and with some on the fringes insisting that President Kwasniewski himself is of Jewish descent.

Others blame the Jews for the Second World War, saying that Hitler was particularly brutal to Poland because of the large number of Jews here. The “logic” there is baffling, but I’ve personally heard the argument at least once.

Anti-Semitism is not just a problem in Poland, though. Jean Marie Le Pen’s surprise success in the French elections some time ago showed that nationalism and rabid xenophobia find fertile ground even in supposedly liberal France.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe. A supposedly suppressed UN report that blamed “a new wave of Antisemitism on Muslim youth and on anti-globalization activists” (Listen to the NPR Report) shows that it’s not just right-wing, neo-fascists who are spreading the ancient, illogical hate of Jews.

People talk of how to reduce anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, but anti-Semitism seems like a hydra. It’s been around for so long and taken so many forms that it seems always to be changing.

  • Anti-Semitism in Christianity has a long history. Jews are still “blamed” for having killed Jesus, as the recent outcries over Mel Gibson’s brutal Passion showed.
  • Hitler magnified a “racial” dimension to anti-Semitism that had been brewing in Europe for at least a hundred and fifty years. Instead of being a religious-ethnic group, Jews became a different race. Indeed, a different species.
  • Contemporary liberals sometimes blame Jewry as a whole for Israel’s sometimes-excessive dealings with Palestinians.
  • Even the super-nutty fringes are not immune. Take a look at Freedom Press and it won’t take long to find a connection ultimately between Jews and aliens (?!?) through the supposed conspiracies of theIlluminati.

Anti-Semitism is, indeed, everywhere, and has been for ages. And despite our “enlightened” times, it appears we might be heading toward another wave of increased anti-Semitism.

Double your pleasure

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In Polish, there are two plural forms for every noun.

It works like this. For numbers 2 through 4, and anything number that includes those numbers (i.e., twenty-two, thirty-five, but not eleven, twelve), there is one plural form; for numbers 5-10, there is another plural form.

“Huh?”

Exactly.

An example might help. “Piwo” is “beer” in Polish. “Two beers” would be “dwa piwa.” “Four beers” would be “cztery piwa.” But “five beers” is “pięć piw.” But at “twenty-one” (yes, I know — who needs to know how to say “twenty-one beers” in Polish?), it would change back to “piwa.” Until you decided to get really wasted and go for twenty-five, at which point you would order “dwadzieścia pięć piw.”

Another example: “Roll” in Polish is “bułka.” “Two rolls” is “dwie bułki.” At five we get the switch again: “pięć bułek.” At twenty-one, it goes back to “bułki.”

Further, if you want to use a plural noun as a direct object in a positive sentence, you use the first plural form; if you want to use it as a direct object of a negative sentence, you use the second form. In other words, to say “I like rolls” you use “bułki,” but to say “I don’t like rolls,” you use “bułek.”

And Poles wonder why their language is so hard for non-Poles…

Any linguistic strangeness where you live?

Underheard

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What is it about the popularity lately of singing through one’s nose? This one is the absolute winner, but it seems to be the “in” thing now.

I was at a bar here in Poland with a friend sometime when that atrocious Anastacia song “Paid My Dues” came on the radio. “Read all the lyrics, sorry though they may be

As Anastacia sang, my friend got that lost-in-the-moment look, then asked me, “What is this song about?”

“I don’t really know,” I replied. “I’ve never really paid much attention to it.”

“But I don’t get it. ‘Paint my juice?’ What is that supposed to mean?”

Is nothing sacred?

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In Poland, separation of church and state doesn’t exist, and priests teach religion courses in publicly funded schools.

Today I caught a student writing cheat notes on his arm for a quiz he was having in religion class!

“You realize that when you take a test and you cheat, it’s the same as lying, right?” I asked him.

“How so?”

“Well, when you take a test, aren’t you implicitly saying that you’re taking the information only from your own knowledge?” I asked.

“I guess,” he muttered.

“Then cheating is a form of lying,” I concluded.

A thoughtful moment. “So?”

So, indeed.

The Sky Was Falling

For most of my life, I’ve awoken not having the slightest idea what I dreamt the night before. I could probably count on my fingers the number of dreams I’ve ever vividly remembered. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ever been terribly interested in dreams or their interpretation.

I’ve only once had a recurring dream. I was in second grade. It was not a time of anxiety for me, as first grade had been, and I was fairly optimistic about my prospects in life. Then suddenly, it began, and continued for at least four nights that I can remember. The same dream, every night — little or no variation.

I’m a court attendant, and I’ve recently been placed in charge of organizing a grand ball for our queen. I was given such a budget that I even did major redecorating in the ballroom, and had an enormous mirror installed on the ceiling. The chandeliers had been removed, and all the light was provided by candles along the wall. I oversaw the menu; I hand-picked the orchestra; I had a multitude of designers working on the decorations.

Finally, the evening of the ball. The guests arrived and were milling about in the ballroom, waiting for the queen’s arrival. And then — the fanfare. The queen’s footmen enter, with her close behind, elegantly dressed. “She is surely impressed with all this,” I think to myself. “It’s going to be the greatest ball ever.” And then I hear a creaking, splintering sound above us all. I look up to see that the mirror has broken apart and is falling in hundreds of pieces. I look at the queen — she’s not aware of what’s going on. I look back up, then back to the queen, thinking “Someone has got to get her out of here!” I take a step in that direction

and I always woke up at that moment.

Four nights. Maybe more.

This is only a test

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Three of the seven classes had a test today on passive voice. You all know what “passive” means, right? You remember getting those papers back from your high school teacher with “passive” scribbled in the margin and wondering, “What the hell does that mean?”

My handy-dandy, five-step, active-to-passive transformation guide.
1. What is the main verb?
2 .What tense is the main verb in?
3. What is the direct object?
4. What is the verb “be” in the tense from question two?
5. What is the past participle of the verb from question one?
And then — 3+4+5=passive voice

If you’re a non-native English speaker reading this, I’m sure you don’t need this explained.

And that’s the irony of it all. In many ways, non-native English speakers know grammar much better than thoseof us who grew up speaking the language.

There’s a whole side of our native language that we native speakers don’t naturally know. For example, if I were to challenge most Americans to construct a sentence in present perfect continuous tense in the subjunctive voice, there might be a bit of head scratching, even thoughthey would understand the sentence, “I would have been writing this forever if you hadn’t helped.” (Yeah, thatexample is a bit awkward, but it works.)

When I first came to Poland to teach English, I had no idea about many such things. For instance, what’s wrong with the sentence, “I have done it yesterday”? Several years ago, though I was an English major in college, I would have had a hard time explaining. Now, it’s simple: “I have done it” is in present perfect tense, and present perfect tense is used for the indefinite past. “Yesterday” is fairly definite, I would say.

Back to the issue at hand: passive voice. A sentence is passive if the subject is not the “doer” of the verb. For example: A ball was thrown. They ball had nothing to do with the action — it indeed received the action. The active would be something like, “My mother threw the ball.”

Today’s test was designed to check students’ ability to change sentences from active to passive, as well as to decide when a sentence should be passive and when active. Some samples from the test:

  • (President / send / me / a letter of congratulations || Present Simple) A letter…
  • (People / write / more books about computers / than about any other subject || Present perfect) More books . . .

Correct answers:

  • A letter of congratulations was sent to me by the president.
  • More books are written about computers than about any other subject.

Some involved just putting the verb in the correct tense. Sort of.

  • This car ______. It’s too old. (not/to steal – Future Simple)
  • This street ______ because of snow. (already/to close – Present Perfect)

Among the English-to-Polish translation (a rarity in my tests) were “tree sap” and “unleaded.” Results, thus far, are less than spectacular.

Shakes and Kisses

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I’ve lived in Poland now for over six years, and there’s a custom I still haven’t come to terms with — the handshake.

In the States, we shake hands only when we first meet someone, or when we’re in some very formal environment. In Poland the handshake is much more common.

In short, you should shake hands with someone if:

  1. You’re a man.
  2. You encounter a man.
  3. You know the man you’re encountering or
  4. He’s with a man you do know.

You shake hands in bars, when you arrive at work, when you pass on the street. Kids shake hands; old men shake hands with young men; directors with teachers — everyone shakes hands.

Some examples:

  • If you go to a bar and you see a friend sitting at a table, you go shake his hand, and you offer your hand to every other man who’s sitting at the table.
  • If you’re walking down the street and an acquaintance is walking the other way, you shake hands, even if you just continue walking.
  • If you’re a student, you shake hands with all your friends every day. Sometimes you see a boy just moving down the hall, shaking hands like a politician.

But it’s not so simple as that. You’re only supposed to shake hands when you first meet each other. Other encounters during the day don’t get the shake.

Traditionally, you’re not supposed to offer your hand to a woman. Indeed, in a really traditional, formal setting, men still kiss women’s hands in Poland.

I’m still not sure when I’m supposed to offer my hand and when I’m not. Rather, I forget. I walk by an acquaintance on the sidewalk and I realize three steps too late that I only said “Czesc” and didn’t offer my hand.

As far as kissing women’s hands go, well, I just keep away. It seems too cavalier (pun intended) for me to do it.

But I kiss men here. In fact, I’ve kissed every single male teacher with whom I work. The three peck, right-cheek, left-cheek, right-cheek-again mwa-mwa-mwa kiss. The triple peck is used in congratulatory situations: name days, weddings, etc. and it’s the most difficult for me, an American, to get used to. After all, while I really like my director, I don’t want to kiss him on a regular basis. But from time to time, at a teacher�s meeting, we give a birthday gift to one of the teachers and then we all line up and mwa-mwa-mwa.

At our wedding, Kinga and I kissed almost all our guests . . .

Make You Squeal Like a Pig

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This is going to be pretty disgusting. Fair warning.

[Image removed]

Part of the preparation for my wedding to a Polish woman who grew up in a very rural area was a pig killing. My father-in-law bought a pig from a farmer some months before the wedding, and then about two weeks before, it was time to kill and dress the pig.

I shot some birds with a shotgun when I was little; I killed a mouse out of mercy because my cat was torturing it — I’ve never seen anything quite that big killed before.

My father said “pig” is the wrong word. “It was a hog,” he says.

I’ll spare the gruesome details for now. What astounded me was the behavior of the butcher’s grandchildren. I was sick to my stomach a few times (but taking pictures nonetheless), and they were running around as if it were a Baptist picnic.

And they sat for a moment, and I was able to get the above picture.

Irritation Squared

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Today I went with Kinga (my wife, for the uninformed) and my father-in-law to Kinga’s brother’s house, which is being built just outside of Krakow. Kinga’s brother is now out of the country, so my father-in-law is taking care of the building process while he’s gone.

The house is “standing raw,” to translate directly from Polish. This means that the walls are done, the roof is done, and it’s ready for the interior finishing.

Houses here are built out of blocks and concrete, not the tooth-pick contracting familiar in America. My friend who spent some time in American working in construction said, “A house like that wouldn’t last a week here. The father would come home drunk one night and destroy the whole thing!”

Recently, the concrete for the floors was poured. There was to be five centimeters of concrete on each floor, poured over ten centimeters of Styrofoam insulation. We went to check that that was done.

“You can’t trust anyone here!” says my father-in-law. When he really gets ranting, he likes to say,

“This country has no right to exist!” and “Poland must be the richest country in the world, because everybody’s stealing and cheating, and yet there’s still something left to steal.”

So Kinga and I measured the area of all the floors while her father drilled random holes in the concrete to check its thickness. The upstairs was fine, but the downstairs floors were one centimeter too thin.

“It’s ridiculous we have to do this,” I muttered as we went throughout the whole house and measured everything. I was talking to my father-in-law about this, and he said, “Oh, it’s surely the same thing happens all over the world.”

And suddenly, we litigation-happy Americans looked pretty good, because, as I said to him, “At least in the States, you could take this guy to court for not fulfilling the contract. What can you do here?” I asked.

“Not much. We’ve already paid.” The point of all the measuring was this: the same company is supposed to come and finish the walls as well, and the hope of negotiation is what motivated the day’s measuring.

But what struck me was the fact that no contractor here has a reputation for being honest.

As my father-in-law said, “You can’t trust anyone here.”