Letter from Poland.

Polish slang – zajebiście!
22.05.2007
Can you keep up with the changing face of Polish language?
By Anna Piwowarska
Last year, I and a male friend of mine used to regularly visit the BUW (the Warsaw University Library) to do some work, as well as to try and find a suitable girlfriend for him. Little did we know was that there is an actual word to describe this rather tragic activity. Attempting to look for a boyfriend or girlfriend in the BUW is such a popular activity that it is officially called – BUW-ing.
When I looked into this a little deeper, I realized that there was a Polish slang word to describe practically everything these days. Of course, there are different environments in which slang develops – prisons, internet chat rooms, hip-hop groups and even hunting circles. However the fastest growing and the most interesting by far is youth slang. This lingo develops between groups of friends, then spreads into the classroom and eventually throughout the school. Finally, if it’s any good it travels throughout the city and by the magic of cyberspace reaches the whole country and the rest of the world.
Youth slang is not only strongly influenced by popular culture but also by foreign languages. The most popular of these is obviously English. English words (usually with Polish spellings) have become such a big part of everyday youth speak that practically everyone is able to understand them. ‘Sorry’ has turned into the popular text message word ‘sory’ (with one ‘r’), ‘hello’ has become the shortened greeting ‘elo’ and ‘fon’ is ‘phone’, spelt with an f. However, it’s not as simple as it seems, and it’s not supposed to be for anyone over the age of twenty. Certain words that derive from the English language are misguiding. They started out meaning the same as their English equivalent but have turned into something else. So for example ‘miting’ spelt with an ‘i’, between Polish high-school students means a two to three day long party rather than anything connected with the work place. And ‘lajt’ spelt ‘l-a-j-t’ is an expression meaning that something is ‘easy’. So, for example if someone asks you how your maths exam went, rather than saying it was ok, you’d say it ‘was ‘lajt’ or ‘lajcik’.
Of course, it’s not just English words that have misleading meanings in youth slang vocabulary. One of the most surprising for me was the use of the word ‘Warszawa’. Apparently this is not just a name of the capital of Poland but it’s also used as a term of abuse. As in the rest of the world, the inhabitants of capital cities are usually disliked by the rest of the country’s population. None more so than in Poland it seems. In some of the websites that I looked at, it said that as all the best Warsaw inhabitants were killed during the Uprising, during the subsequent years Communist authorities encouraged many people to move to the capital from surrounding villages. This meant that the inhabitants of the capital city were not townies but rather villagers. These days, it is still the case that people from small towns and villages come to the capital to seek their fortune. So consequently, instead of being referred to as a metropolis, ‘Warsaw’ in youth slang is referred to as a ‘village’. For example, you could abuse someone by saying “Go back to milking cows in Warsaw” or “Go back to the village” or simply “You Warsaw citizen, you!”.
My favourite type of youth slang is that used in the school place. These days you don’t just use callous nicknames to point out your teachers’ physical defects, verbal stammers of fashion faux-pas. Now, there are nationally recognized words used to describe teachers. So, for example a history teacher is called a ‘histeryczka’ meaning ’hysterical woman’ (the joke coming from the similarity of the words hysterical and historical) and a German teacher is referred to as a ‘Helga’ (presumably after the German female name). Any female teacher is called a ‘baba’, a Polish word that is usually used as a crude description for any woman. For some reason I couldn’t find any slang words for male teachers which makes me think that most youth slang is probably created by teenage boys.
The problem with slang is it goes out of date very quickly. I remember teaching my English friends the word ‘zajebiście’ a few years back, to describe when something is ‘brilliant’ or ‘great’. These days, 'zajebiście' is out-of-date unless it is used to mean the opposite. So you could say that something is ‘zajebiście’ boring. It’s used in conjunction with a negative adjective, as a sort of superlative of the negative.
There is no doubt that Polish slang is an important part of the changing face of Poland. The young writer, and laureate of the prestigious Nike award, Dorota Masłowska, has made her career cleverly creating a whole new form of literature based on youth slang. Her latest book’ ‘The Queen’s Peacock’ even rhymes in slang. However, for all those of us who can’t quite keep up it’s probably best to just be an observer rather than a participant. By the time, we learn the newest youth slang, it will probably be mean something else altogether. Take ‘gadać z niedzwiedziem’ (‘talking to a bear’), for example. Today it means ‘to vomit’ but who knows what that will mean in a year or two....