Recently I mentioned the absurdity of the “Freedom Fries” wave sweeping across Patriotic Probably-Mostly-Republican America. Language is a living thing, and we can’t read current politics into a word’s etymology, I argued.

An amusing example of this in Polish: the word “pan.”

In modern usage, it has the meaning of “mister,” as in, “Mr. S” being “Pan S.” “Mrs.” is “Pani,” and on a side not, I know from an Indian friend that “pani” is Hindi for “water.”

Linguistic webs aside, “pan” would also be translated to French as “vous,” or to German as “Sie.” So when speaking to a stranger in Polish, you speak to them in third person singular out of respect. (Unless you live in the mountains down south and are speaking a dialect, and then it’s like French: second person plural.)

Armed with only this knowledge and some elementary Polish, you’ll be in for an amusing surprise when you go to Mass, because you’ll hear God referred to as “Pan Bóg.”

“Mr. God?” was my first surprised reaction.

More digging.

“Pan” also, and originally, means something like “master,” in the sort of 18th-century, English manor sense. So the patriotic Mickiewicz poem Pan Tadeusz wouldn’t be translated, as a Pole joked with me, “Mr. Teddy,” but rather, “Master Tad” (Source).

And so now “Pan Bóg” makes since: it’s simply “Lord,” or even “the Lord God.” When I learned all this, I stopped snickering under my breath whenever I rarely attended Mass with a friend.

Until I noticed the reference to God being “blue.”