Category Archives: language

by Joel | 22 December 2025 · 7:39 am

Not the End of Faroutliers Yet!

I want to express my profound gratitude and appreciation to the doctors, nurses, technicians, and orderlies of Wojewódzki Szpital Zespolony w Kielcach for saving my life during my sudden blogging hiatus this month. I was experiencing a variety of symptoms of my body shutting down: extreme fatigue, loss of appetite, loss of weight, short-windedness, etc. My wife booked me a general checkup at a private clinic, who referred me immediately to the emergency room of the top provincial (voivodal) hospital when they saw extreme atrial fibrillation in my EKG. My heart was not pumping enough blood into the rest of my body.

One of the senior triage nurses that welcomed me became my guardian angel. She could speak in tongues! She had worked abroad in Ireland and spoke very fast and fluent English. She explained what I could expect in the busy Cardiology and Electrotherapy Ward, and during each of her shifts, she would come by and tell me what their findings were and what to expect next.

They first checked my heart with EKGs and tomography, and got my heartrate under control with a panoply of drugs that I am now taking at home. I could see my BP finally begin to rise from low systolic 55 until it broke 100. (My typical BP used to be ~120/70.) I began predicting my temperature and BP in Polish numbers. My appetite quickly revived with the hearty but healthy Polish hospital fare served from a roll-around field kitchen.

The least pleasant task was last, downing 3 liters of laxative-laden water before 10 pm, and one more liter after 5 am to prepare for my colonoscopy the next morning. After that procedure I underwent an extremely painful gastroscopy, without anesthesia in either procedure. They were both critical steps in my diagnosis. After a night to recover, I was discharged the next day, with a full hospital record of every assessment, measurement, dosage, or procedure, all in Polish.

I came home with a much lighter heart, an appetite intact, a long list of pharmaceuticals, and a much rosier outlook as the days finally begin to lengthen! I’ll try to follow up with a few lighter-hearted impressions of this foreigner’s week in a Polish hospital ward.

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Filed under blogging, disease, drugs, family, language, Poland, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 19 December 2025 · 11:53 pm

RLS, Missionaries, and Chiefs

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 625-628:

Westerners took pride in bringing faith to the heathen in the Pacific; that was often invoked as their principal justification for being there. By the Stevensons’ time, missionaries were ubiquitous, distributed variously by denomination depending on the region. Maps were published that indicated the predominant territories of Catholics, Congregationalists, United Presbyterians, Free Church of Scotland, Wesleyans, Baptists, and Mormons. In Samoa a minority were Catholics, but the dominant group was the “L.M.S,” the interdenominational London Missionary Society.

During the cruises on the Casco, Equator, and Janet Nicholl, Louis had formed a negative view of missionaries as moralistic bullies, but in Samoa he got to know a number of them well and gained great respect. They were less dogmatic theologically than he had been led to expect, and in fact took a deep interest in native beliefs and did pioneering work in ethnography. They knew and understood the people much better than foreign bureaucrats did, who didn’t bother to learn the language and were regularly rotated in and out of Samoa.

In 1892 Louis told a journalist, “Missions in the South Seas generally are far the most pleasing result of the presence of white men; and those in Samoa are the best I have ever seen.” He especially admired William Clarke, who had mistaken the family for traveling entertainers when he first saw them on the Apia beach. Louis wrote to Colvin, “The excellent Clarke was up here almost all day yesterday, a man I esteem and like to the soles of his boots; indeed, I prefer him to any man in Samoa and to most people in the world.”

Many of the missionaries were fluent in Samoan, and one of them, who gave Louis regular lessons, recalled that Louis “thought the language was wonderful. The extent of the vocabulary, the delicate differences of form and expressive shades of meaning, the wonderful varieties of the pronouns and particles astonished him.” The point is striking: he liked language to be complex.

The division between Catholics and Protestants was evident but not hostile, and there were adherents of both at Vailima (the Catholics were known as Popies). Louis’s closest missionary friends were Protestants, but he was fond of Catholic priests as well. “He had a special admiration,” Graham Balfour said, “for the way in which they identified themselves with the natives and encouraged all native habits and traditions at all compatible with Christianity.” Also, he enjoyed speaking French with them.

At one point Louis’s friend Adelaide Boodle wrote from Bournemouth to say that she was considering a trip to Samoa but had been urged to avoid places that had no Anglican clergy, presumably because she wouldn’t be able to take Communion in the authorized way. Louis replied, “Christ himself and the twelve apostles seem to me to have gone through this rough world without the support of the Anglican communion. I am pained that a friend of mine should conceive life so smally as to think she leaves the hand of her God because she leaves a certain clique of clergymen and a certain scattered handful of stone buildings, some of them with pointed windows, most with belfries, and a few with an illumination of the Ten Commandments on the wall.”

As Louis had discovered in Tahiti, islanders might embrace conversion but continue to hold on quietly to their old beliefs. “We may see the difficulty in its highest terms,” he wrote in his notebook, “when a missionary asks a savage if he believes it is the virtuous who are to be happiest in a future state, and receives an affirmative reply. The good man is much pleased with such incipient orthodoxy, while all the time they have been juggling with each other with misunderstood symbols. The missionary had Christian virtue in his mind, while the Tupinamba [an Amazon tribe] means by the virtuous ‘those who have well revenged themselves and eaten many of their enemies.’”

One of Louis’s unpublished fables, “Something in It,” explores the mutual incomprehension of belief systems. A missionary violates a native taboo and is carried off by a spirit to be baked and devoured. As a preliminary step he is required to drink ritual kava, which he refuses on the grounds that it is intoxicating and therefore forbidden. He is asked, “Are you going to respect a taboo at a time like this? And you were always so opposed to taboos when you were alive!” He replies, “To other people’s. Never to my own.” He is thereupon sent back to the world of the living, as unqualified to enter the spirit world. “‘I seem to have been misinformed upon some points,’ said he. ‘Perhaps there is not much in it, as I supposed; but there is something in it after all. Let me be glad of that.’” The taboo and the missionary’s rules, Roslyn Jolly says, “are utterly alien to each other, equally valid, with neither able to command universal authority.”

Well-meaning and sympathetic though individual missionaries might be, they were still complicit in the deployment of Christianity as an agent of imperialism. Louis would probably have appreciated Jomo Kenyatta’s comment in twentieth-century Kenya: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

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by Joel | 19 December 2025 · 8:05 am

RLS First Encounters Polynesia

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 534-537:

Continuing in a southwesterly direction, the Casco made its first landfall after three weeks at the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas, thirty-five hundred miles from Hawaii. Melville had lived there in 1842, and made it the setting for the semi-fictionalized memoir Typee, to which Louis had been introduced by Stoddard. Melville’s other South Seas book was Omoo, a Marquesan word meaning someone who wanders from one island to another. Louis was an Omoo now.

In the travel book he did eventually write, In the South Seas, he described this moment: “The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.” When the Casco dropped anchor “it was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up.”

This was Louis’s first encounter with Polynesian culture, and the beginning of his sympathy with the islanders at a time when that culture was being destroyed; the Marquesas were nominally independent but by now controlled by France. He recorded a conversation with a teenage mother nursing her little baby. When she questioned him about England he described, “as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the overpopulation, the hunger, and the perpetual toil.” She sat for a time silent, “gravely reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows.” And then,

It struck in her another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom, and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people. “Ici pas de kanaques [there are no kanakas here],” said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her hands. “Tenez—a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more.” The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.

Foreigners sometimes used the term kanaka as a racist put-down, but it wasn’t originally negative. In the Polynesian languages [via Hawaiian—J] it simply meant “people,” and Richard Henry Dana had observed in Two Years before the Mast that islanders everywhere called themselves by that name—“they were the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with.”

Louis was struck by the matter-of-fact way in which the islanders referred to cannibalism, which had been practiced until very recently. He was introduced to a chief who was notable as “the last eater of long pig in Nukuhiva.”

Not many years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man’s arm across his shoulder. “So does Kooamua to his enemies!” he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the man of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone’s—only for the brownness of the skin, and the high-chief’s tattooing, all one side and much of the other being of an even blue.

Kooamua enjoyed a tour of the Casco, and commented that as a chief he had to observe exact sobriety, but a few days later they encountered him hopelessly drunk “in a state of smiling and lopsided imbecility.”

Margaret was open-minded about everything she was seeing, including the exposed skin and tattoos that missionaries denounced. “Two most respectable-looking old gentlemen wore nothing but small red and yellow loincloths and very cutty sarks [short skirts] on top. There were even some who wore less! The display of legs was something we were not accustomed to; but as they were all tattooed in most wonderful patterns, it really looked quite as if they were wearing openwork silk tights. . . . Fanny and I feel very naked with our own plain white legs when we are bathing.” Margaret had no prejudice concerning skin color, either. She mentioned one man who wore a garment “leaving an ample stretch of brown satin skin exposed to view. What wonderful skins they all have, by the way!”

It amused her that the Marquesans invented new names for the visitors.

Louis was at first “the old man,” much to his distress; but now they call him “Ona,” meaning owner of the yacht, a name he greatly prefers to the first. Fanny is Vahine, or wife; I am the old woman, and Lloyd rejoices in the name of Maté Karahi, the young man with glass eyes (spectacles). Perhaps it is a compliment here to call one old, as it is in China. At any rate, one native told Louis that he himself was old, but his mother was not!

The name “Ona” was important. That implied that Louis was a rich man traveling solely for pleasure, as contrasted with the unscrupulous traders who were constantly trying to cheat the Polynesians.

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by Joel | 8 December 2025 · 8:34 pm

RLS’s Highlanders

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 472-477:

However Louis’s best fiction may have originated, it sprang from long-meditated themes. His love of tales of piracy was waiting for Treasure Island; his dread of interior conflict was waiting for Jekyll and Hyde. The roots of Kidnapped reached back to his earliest days, when his family spent extended vacations at Bridge of Allan, a popular health resort northwest of Edinburgh. Nearby were Stirling Castle, which had endured eight sieges over the years, and the battlefield of Bannockburn, where a Scottish army defeated the English in the fourteenth century. Bridge of Allan was also close to the imaginary line that divided the Lowlands from the Highlands, as shown on the map (fig. 56). It wasn’t an actual physical boundary, or an administrative one either, but reflected an awareness that the cultures on either side were profoundly different from each other. In Kidnapped a character mentions “the Highland line.”

Louis was there at least ten times between the ages of three and twenty-five, and eagerly devoured tales of the romantic past. At Davos he planned to write a formal history of the Highlands, and although that never happened, the reading he did for it was still fresh in his mind when he began Kidnapped.

As their name implies, the Highlands of Scotland are very different, geographically and geologically, from the fertile Lowlands. They are dominated by mountain ranges, and Ben Nevis, at 4,400 feet, is the highest mountain in the British Isles. Population was sparse, supported mainly by cattle raising and subsistence farming. In a book about “Britishness” Linda Colley says that Lowland Scots “traditionally regarded their Highland countrymen as members of a different and inferior race, violent, treacherous, poverty-stricken and backward.” Conversely, Highlanders regarded the urban and commercial Lowlanders as a threat to their way of life.

As everyday garments men in the Highlands wore kilts, which were originally full-length cloaks but in the eighteenth century had been modified to knee-length skirts (women wore dresses, not kilts). The common language of the Highlands was Gaelic, completely different from the Lallans (“Lowland”) Scots that Louis enjoyed using; he never learned Gaelic. In the Lowlands most of the landlords, merchants, lawyers, clergy, and professors had welcomed the 1707 union of Scotland with England. They spoke English, and many of them pursued careers in London. That was the class to which both sides of Louis’s family belonged. He never felt that he belonged, however, and he identified in imagination with the culture of the Highlands, which appealed to him as romantic, passionate, and risk-taking—everything Edinburgh was not. “In spite of the difference of blood and language,” he once wrote, “the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.”

Clann is the Gaelic word for “family,” and clan membership was fundamental to Highland life. “The Highlands were tribal,” the historian T. C. Smout says, “in the exact sense that nineteenth-century Africa was tribal.” A clan might coincide geographically with a particular region, but some chieftains had no land at all; the basis of allegiance was blood relationship. Clan members owed military service to their chief if summoned, a feudal obligation that had not existed in England since the Middle Ages. The obligation of service operated in both directions. Smout explains, “Since all the clansmen from the chief downwards were blood relations of each other, it followed that the chiefs were expected to feel fatherly obligations even towards the poorest and weakest, and all the clansmen were expected to give unstinted help to each other in time of crisis.”

…

There were at least 120 clans in Scotland (including some in the Lowlands), depending how they’re counted—possibly more than 200. Among the most famous Highland clans were the Campbells and Stewarts in the south, the Mackenzies and Macdonalds further north, and in the western Hebrides the Macleans and Macleods. The map indicates the principal locations of a number of clans.

As Fernand Braudel showed in his classic study of the Mediterranean, mountain people everywhere have resisted control from outside, fragmenting into tribes or clans and engaging in endless feuds. Clan solidarity was intense in the Highlands; a character in Kidnapped comments that “they all hing together like bats in a steeple.”

Louis empathized with their defense of a traditional culture. Walter Scott’s novels celebrated the heroic past—that was why Louis’s father loved them—but he acknowledged the historical fatality of its passing, and understood that the defeat of the clans made the development of modern Scotland possible. Louis felt deeply disaffected from modern Scotland, and lost causes always fired his imagination.

Kidnapped is set in 1751, at a time in history that may need some context today. After King James of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603 as James I, his line—the Stuarts—had occupied the British throne, ruling over England and Wales as well as Scotland. In 1714, however, the next Stuart in the succession was a Catholic. He would have become King James III, but Parliament had declared Catholicism to be disqualifying, and a Protestant imported from Germany was crowned instead as George I. From then on, many Scots claimed allegiance to the displaced Stuart heir, who was known as the Pretender. His supporters were called Jacobites, from Jacobus, the Latin form of James.

In 1715 James led an armed rebellion to recover the throne, but was defeated in battle in the north of England and spent the rest of his days in France. There was a second rebellion in 1745, led by his son Charles Edward Stuart—“Bonnie Prince Charlie”—and it too was put down. Many Scots continued privately to toast the Pretender as “the king over the water,” but England cracked down, constructing forts throughout Scotland to maintain control. English soldiers—the notorious redcoats—patrolled everywhere, and in effect the Highlands became occupied territory.

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by Joel | 6 December 2025 · 3:27 pm

Silesian Polish

My latest newsletter from Culture.pl contains a link to several observations by Janusz R. Kowalczyk about linguistic variation within Poland. Here is his characterization of Silesian.

An excellent example of the Silesian dialect can be found in Stanisław Ligoń’s ‘Gowa. Łozmyślania filozoficzne’ (The Head: Philosophical Musings), included in his Bery i bojki śląskie (Silesian Jokes and Fairy Tales), published by Śląsk Publishers, Katowice, 1980.

Stanisław Ligoń, ‘Gowa. Łozmyślania filozoficzne’

Dzisiok wszystko na świecie mo gowa – ludzie i gadzina, gwoździe, cukier i kapusta. Gowa kapuściano różni sie jednak bardzo łod gowy ludzkiej, a to skuli tego, że kapuściano jest pożytecno! Dzisiejsze dziołchy nie majom gowy, a jeno gówki, nie przymierzając jak zapołki, szpyndliki, abo lalki. Kiej jednak zapołka bez gówki nie przido sie na nic – to u ludzi ni – jest blank na łopach. Bardzo często cłowiek bez gówki łostoł srogim cłowiekiem, bo posłem – bali, nieroz i ministrem. […] W gowie polityka abo redachtora lęgnom sie roztomaite cygaństwa i kacki. Z gowy Jowisza wyskocyła Pallas Atena. Rekrut ma w gowie wdycki siano; łotwarto gowa mo adwokat, ciężko gowa mo zwykle literat, aktór, malyrz, abo inkszy pijok; mokro gowa mo waryjot, a zmyto gowa mo wdycki mąż, zaś choro gowa majom wszyjscy, kierzy cytajom nasze gazeciska. […] Politycy i kandydaci na nowych prziszłych posłów łomiom se gowa nad nowymi cygaństwami, kierymi chcom chytać łobywateli ło ciasnych gowach.

[Today, everything in the world has a head – people and animals, nails, sugar and cabbage. However, the head of a cabbage is very different from a human head, chiefly because the cabbage head is useful! Today’s girls don’t have proper heads, just tiny ones, not unlike matches, pins or dolls. While a match without a head is good for nothing, that’s not the case with people – it’s completely the opposite. Very often, a man without a head becomes a grand persona, such as an MP – or even a minister. […] Various lies and nonsense crop up in the head of a politician or an editor. Pallas Athena jumped out of Jupiter’s head. A recruit has nothing but hay in his head; a lawyer has an open head, a writer usually a heavy one, similarly an actor, a painter or some other drunkard; a crazy one’s head is wet, while a husband always has a washed head, sick in the head are all those who read our newspapers. […] Politicians and candidates for new future MPs are breaking their heads over new deceptions with which they want to capture citizens with narrow(-minded) heads.] [These are all idiomatic expressions containing the word ‘head’]

Glossary: bali (also, indeed, even), blank (quite, completely), dzisiok (today), dziołcha (girl), gadzina (animals), inkszy (other), łopach (the opposite), roztomaity (various), skuli tego (because of this, because), srogi (big, great), szpyndlik (pin), wdycki (always).

As any Polish speaker can see, the Silesian dialect (or, according to a growing group of researchers, the Silesian language) has many expressions that differ from Polish vocabulary. The beginning of the formation of the Silesian dialect dates back to the period of district division, which took place approximately 800 years ago.

Like any language, it has undergone transformations over time. It has split into many local varieties. Nowadays, there are four main Silesian dialects, in at least several dozen specific regionalisms.

Silesian is to a large degree an Old Polish language. It contains words and phrases that were used in the past throughout Poland but are now generally forgotten.

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by Joel | 5 December 2025 · 4:18 pm

Kashubian vs. Polish

My latest newsletter from Culture.pl contains a link to several observations by Janusz R. Kowalczyk about linguistic variation within Poland. Here are some extracts from his coverage of Kashubian.

There are two official languages in our country: Polish and Kashubian. In addition, we have dialects: Masovian, Lesser Poland dialect, Greater Poland dialect, Silesian, mixed ones in the east of the country and new mixed dialects in the west and north. These are divided into several dozen regionalisms; some of them occur in only a few towns, so they even more so deserve tender care.

…

In the north of Poland, students learn Kashubian in school. They can take the secondary school exit exam in this language. Official signs of the region’s institutions and local information have versions in the two languages.

Why did Kashubians specifically get the privilege of having their speech recognized as a separate language? Mainly because it is much less understandable than others. Hardworking Kashubians have created a grammar of their language, published literary works as well as textbooks and dictionaries in it.

The dialects used by the inhabitants in a given area formed over many centuries. They contain phrases characteristic of the lands from which their ancestors came. Their neighbours also undoubtedly had an influence on the shape of their speech – hence, for example, loanwords from German in Greater Poland and, accompanied by Czech, in Silesia.

The sentence ‘There is a glass of tea on the cupboard in the hall’ is ‘W antryju na byfyju stoi szolka tyju’ in Silesian and ‘W przedpokoju na kredensie stoi szklanka herbaty’ in Polish. In turn, the nursery rhyme from Greater Poland, ‘W antrejce na ryczce stały pyry w tytce, przyszła niuda, spucła pyry, a w wymborku myła giry’ (In the hall, on a stool, there were potatoes in a paper bag; a pig came, ate the potatoes and washed her feet in the bucket), in standard Polish would read, ‘W przedpokoju na stołku stały ziemniaki w papierowej torebce, przyszła świnia, zjadła ziemniaki, a w wiadrze myła nogi’.

Certain words sound different in different dialects, such as the mentioned potatoes. In Greater Poland they are ‘pyry’; among the Kashubians, ‘bulwy’; in Podhale, ‘grule’; for the inhabitants of Kresy (eastern borderlands), ‘barabole’; for the people of Kurpie and Silesia, ‘kartofle’. In turn, other foreign phrases, such as those taken from Wallachian and characteristic of the highlander dialect, ‘bryndza’ and ‘bundz’, have long become established in the colloquial language.

Time will tell whether this will also be true of the following words, which are for now properly understood only locally:

Kashubia: apfelzyna (orange), cedelk (card), chùtkò (fast), darżëszcze (road), grónk (jug), szãtopiérz (bat);

Podlasie (so-called speaking ‘po prostu’ [simply], ‘po swojemu’ [in your own way]): cieper (now), czyżyk (boy), klekotun (stork), mączka (sugar), poklikać (call), ślozy (tears), zieziulka (cuckoo);

Silesia: bajtel (child), binder (tie), kusik (kiss), szmaterlok (butterfly), śtrasbanka (tram);

Greater Poland: bejmy (money), chabas (meat), glazejki (gloves), gzik (cottage cheese), kejter (dog), szneka z glancem (yeast bun with icing);

Lesser Poland: andrut (waffle), bańka (Christmas tree bauble), chochla (spoon), cwibak (fruit cake), miednica (large bowl), sagan (kettle), sznycel (minced cutlet), warzyć (cook).

Here is the Lord’s Prayer in Kashubian, with standard Polish below.

Òjcze nasz, jaczi jes w niebie,
niech sã swiãcy Twòje miono,
niech przińdze Twòje królestwò,
niech mdze Twòja wòlô
jakno w niebie tak téż na zemi.
Chleba najégò pòwszednégò dôj nóm dzysô
i òdpùscë nóm naje winë,
jak i më òdpùszcziwómë naszim winowajcóm.
A nie dopùscë na nas pòkùszeniô,
ale nas zbawi òde złégò. Amen

Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie,
święć się imię Twoje,
przyjdź królestwo Twoje,
bądź wola Twoja jako w niebie tak i na ziemi,
chleba naszego powszedniego daj nam dzisiaj,
i odpuść nam nasze winy,
jako i my odpuszczamy naszym winowajcom,
i nie wódź nas na pokuszenie,
ale nas zbaw od złego. Amen

This text written in the indigenous Kashubian language contains characters unknown in Polish: ã, é, ë, ò, ô, ù.

ã – nasal ‘a’ (IPA: [ã], so-called ‘a’ with tilde);
é – approximately ‘yj’ (IPA: [e], [ej], so-called ‘e’ with acute);
ë – between ‘e’ and ‘a’ (IPA: [ə], so-called schwa);
ò – ‘łe’ (IPA: [wɛ], so-called labialisation);
ô – depending on the dialect, identical with ‘o’ or more inclined towards ‘e’ (IPA: [ɞ] or [ɔ], so-called ‘o’ with circumflex);
ù – ‘łu’ (IPA: [wu]).

However, the letter ‘u’ is read like ‘u’ inclined towards ‘i’ [u/i]. There are also differences in the grammar of the two languages.

The oldest texts containing Kashubian records date back to 1402, but these are text in Polish containing Kashubianisms and not texts written entirely in Kashubian. The oldest Kashubian printed texts are considered to be the 1586 ‘Duchowne piesnie Dra Marcina Luthera i inszich naboznich męzow’ (Spiritual Songs of Dr Martin Luther and Other Pious Men) by Szimón Krofey.

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by Joel | 4 December 2025 · 1:32 pm

Taboos in Treasure Island

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 381-383:

It’s important to note that due to Victorian conventions, much of real life had to be left out of Treasure Island. A few years later Louis composed a sailors’ song purportedly heard in a London pub:

It’s there we trap the lasses
All waiting for the crew;
It’s there we buy the trader’s rum
What bores a seaman through.

The rum got into Treasure Island, the lasses didn’t. Although one wouldn’t expect female characters to play an important role in a quest for treasure, it’s still striking that Jim’s mother is the only woman in the entire book. In later novels, Catriona above all, Louis would try hard to give women a major role, but like other writers at the time he felt seriously inhibited by obligatory prudery. Publishers made their biggest profits by selling to lending libraries, which rejected outright any novel that hinted at sex. Louis told Colvin, “This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in at all.” Even when he did create female characters later on, he took great care to avoid sexually suggestive implications.

Victorian taboos were so strict that Louis’s pirates couldn’t even swear, though he himself, as Lloyd recalled, “could swear vociferously.” While he was writing Treasure Island he complained to Henley, “Buccaneers without oaths—bricks without straw.” He solved the problem by never actually quoting what they said: “With a dreadful oath he stumbled off.” No doubt he appreciated Dickens’s solution in Great Expectations, which was to write “bless” whenever Bill Barley, an old sea dog, would have said “damn”—“Here’s old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder, here’s your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.”

The last of the seventeen installments of Treasure Island was published in Young Folks in January 1882, for a total payment of ₤30. For book publication Henley, as de facto agent, negotiated a contract with Cassell for ₤100; that may not sound like much, but it was a lot at the time, equivalent to ₤6,500 today. At that time Henley had an editorial position at Cassell’s, and had thrown the Young Folks installments on the chief editor’s desk with the exclamation, “There is a book for you!” Louis wrote to thank him: “Bravo, Bully Boy! Bravo! You are the Prince of Extortioners. Continue to extortion.” To his parents he described it as “a hundred pounds, all alive, oh! A hundred jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid.” Not only did he get ₤100 from Cassell, but they agreed to a royalty of ₤20 for every thousand copies after the first four thousand.

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by Joel | 3 December 2025 · 1:04 am

Polish Gym Terms

To help us endure the long, cold winter here, we joined what appears to be Poland’s largest chain of fitness centers. Its name and motto hints at its international connections: Zdrofit: Więcej niż Fitness. The motto translates into ‘More than Fitness’ and the name itself is a mashup of Zdro[wie] ‘health’ plus fit[ness].

Much of its equipment is manufactured by Matrix Fitness, a division of Johnson Health Tech Co. Ltd., out of Taichung, Taiwan, with several subsidiaries in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin. The exercise machines are named in either Polish or English, but each comes with a list of instructions in Polish.

For instance, the LAT PULL and PECTORAL FLY machines both show diagrams with Polish labels Faza Początkowa (starting position) and Faza Końcowa (ending position). Some machines mark those positions in English. Underneath, they show human figures with the zaangażowane mięsnie ‘engaged muscles’ in red. (Compare mięso ‘meat’ with mięsień ‘muscle’.)

Step-by-step instructions for Wykonanie Ćwiczenia ‘performing the exercise’ follow.

Our branch of the gym at the Galeria Korona shopping mall had a major plumbing disaster about a month ago, so users of the restrooms in the Szatnia Męska (men’s locker room) and Szatnia Damska (women’s locker room) were invited to make use of the shared łazienka i przysznic dla osób z niepełnosprawnościami ‘bathroom and shower for people with not-full-efficiency-Inst’ (in instrumental case).

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Filed under industry, language, Poland, Taiwan, travel, U.S.

by Joel | 26 November 2025 · 7:01 pm

Slovakia in 1939

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 27-29:

Pupils at the gymnasium were given a choice of religious instruction: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or none. Walter chose none. On his identity papers, in the space set aside for nationality, he could have entered the word ‘Jewish’ but instead chose ‘Czechoslovak’. At school, he was now learning not only German but High German. (He had struck a deal with an émigré pupil: each boy would give the other advanced lessons in his native tongue.) In the class picture for 1936, his gaze is confident, even cocky. He is staring straight ahead, into the future.

But in the photograph for the academic year 1938–9 there was no sign of fourteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg. Everything had changed, including the shape of the country. After the Munich agreement of 1938, Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian allies had broken off chunks of Czechoslovakia, parceling them out between them and, by the spring of 1939, what was left was sliced up. Slovakia announced itself as an independent republic. In reality it was a creature of the Third Reich, conceived with the blessing and protection of Berlin, which saw in the ruling ultra-nationalist Hlinka, or Slovak People’s Party, a mirror of itself. A day later the Nazis annexed and invaded the remaining Czech lands, marching in to declare a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary seized one last chunk for itself. Once the carve-up was done, the people who lived in what used to be Czechoslovakia were all, to varying degrees, at the mercy of Adolf Hitler.

In Slovakia, the teenage Walter Rosenberg felt the difference immediately. He was told that, no matter the choice he had made for religious studies classes and the word he had put in the ‘nationality’ box on those forms, he met the legal definition of a Jew and was older than thirteen; therefore, his place at the Bratislava high school was no longer available. His education was terminated.

All across the country, Jews like Walter were coming to understand that although the new head of government was a Catholic priest – Father Jozef Tiso – the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination. The antisemites’ enduring creed held that Jews were not merely unreliable, untrustworthy and irreversibly foreign, but also endowed with almost supernatural powers, allowing them to wield social and economic influence out of all proportion to their numbers. So naturally the authorities in Bratislava moved fast to blame the country’s tiny Jewish community – 89,000 in a population of two and a half million – for the fate that had befallen the nation, including the loss of cherished territory to Hungary. Propaganda posters appeared, pasted on brick walls; one showed a proud young Slovak, clad in the black uniform of the Hlinka Guard, kicking the backside of a hook-nosed, side-curled Jew – the Jew’s purse of coins falling to the ground. In his first radio address as leader of the newly independent republic, Tiso made only one firm policy commitment: ‘to solve the Jewish question’.

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Filed under Czechia, education, Germany, Hungary, language, military, nationalism, philosophy, religion, Slovakia

by Joel | 25 November 2025 · 3:37 am

Poland to Manchuria and Back, 1940s

My latest compilation from Culture.pl has a long story about a Polish boy who went to Manchuria and back during the 1940s: Untold WWII Stories: A Boy’s Wartime Journey from Poland to Manchuria & Back. Here are a few excerpts:

Jerzy Sikora’s childhood was a whirlwind of war and exile. His father, a spy, vanished; his mother died, leaving him alone in Manchuria with his young sister. Arrest, hunger and betrayal shadowed his early years until an American soldier plucked him from chaos, setting him on a path back to Poland. But survival was just the beginning – reunion, loss and resilience would define the rest.

…

The story might have begun in 1936, when I was born, but let’s start with 1939, when my parents and I fled east after the war erupted. My mother (1909–1946) and my father (1907–1957) traveled as far as Busk, a town 40 kilometres east of Lviv. It was there that I was baptized, most likely in the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Stanislaus. But our time together was short. On 15 September 1939, we were forced to separate from my father. The Polish military gave the order – it must have been in response to the Soviet invasion of Poland from the east. My mother and I suddenly found ourselves trapped in Soviet-occupied territory. Under the cover of darkness, we made a daring crossing of the Bug River, fleeing westward. After a long and arduous journey, we reached Siedlce, where fate intervened. By sheer chance, we encountered my uncle; with him, we made our way back to Warsaw.

…

Then, in early 1940, a Japanese man appeared at our door. Perhaps he was connected to the Japanese Embassy – I will never know for sure. But he carried something that would change everything: a letter from my father. In it, he begged my mother to apply for an official passport from the German occupation authorities to seek permission to leave for Japan. Somehow, money was arranged – perhaps through the Japanese messenger – enough to fund our journey. And so, in the spring of that year, we left Nazi-occupied Poland. Our escape was surreal – Berlin, Rome, Naples. We traveled by train, crossing hostile territory, until finally, we boarded a ship – the Hakozaki Maru. The journey carried us through the Suez Canal, across the Indian Ocean, at last reaching Japan, where we reunited with my father.

Our time in Japan was brief. Before long, we set sail once again, this time bound for Manchuria, eventually arriving in Changchun (then known as Hsinking). We settled in a small, single-story house with a garden, in a neighbourhood inhabited primarily by Japanese families in the northern part of the city. I spent my days playing with the local children – Japanese boys and girls from the neighbourhood. I picked up enough of their language to communicate with them easily. Childhood, even in the shadow of war, had its moments of normalcy.

…

On 29 January 1942, my sister, Anna Elżbieta, was born. At first, I barely registered her presence in my life. It wasn’t until nearly a year later that I truly ‘noticed’ her – when she sat down on our cat, and the cat did nothing. I was stunned. My own relationship with that cat had been nothing but claws and scratches. Whenever I tried to pet it, it defended itself fiercely. And yet, when Anna plopped down on top of it, the cat didn’t protest at all. Life changed again around that time. We moved into a larger, multi-story building, closer to the city centre. My father had an office on the upper floor, a space that was strictly off-limits to me. And yet, of course, that only made it more tempting. I snuck in a few times. Inside, I found kind, polite Japanese adults, but nothing particularly exciting. No grand mysteries, no hidden treasures – just stacks of paper and colourful pencils.

…

One day, I found myself witnessing a remarkable event: the last emperor of China, Puyi, being driven through the city. A convoy of cars made its way through the streets, and what struck me most was not the sight of the emperor himself but the fear that surrounded him. Fifty metres from the road, policemen blocked all movement. No one was allowed to approach. Worse still, we were ordered to turn our backs to the procession. No one was to look directly at him. One man hesitated – perhaps he didn’t obey quickly enough. A policeman slapped him across the face. I managed to sneak a glance. And what did I see? Just a few cars. That was all. And yet, the air was thick with tension, as if a single wrong move could change everything.

…

Not far from where we lived stood a Franciscan convent complex, surrounded by a high, solid wall. It wasn’t just a convent – inside, there was a chapel, a shelter for the poor, a small hospital, a school with a boarding house for girls and even a farm with cows and pigs. In the fall of 1945, I was admitted to the school as an exception – the only boy in an all-girl class.

Once again, I was faced with the challenge of forming letters into words – but this time, in English. I still resisted it, just as I had with Polish. Far more interesting were the mandolin lessons and drawing classes, especially because the drawing teacher was not a nun. She was a young woman, different from the others. I still remember how patient and kind she was, guiding my hand as I struggled to draw a pear. She showed me how to use three colours – yellow, red, and green – to make it look real. Her name was Larysa Ogienko. At the time, I knew little about her. Only later did I learn that she was the daughter of a White Army officer who had fled Russia during the October Revolution. I didn’t know it yet, but she would play a crucial role in my survival in China after I lost my parents.

The end of World War II was not a sudden event for me – it was a slow fading of the world I had known. The Japanese gradually disappeared from our surroundings. My father stopped going to work. I remember him sitting at home, carving wooden clogs. Was he trying to earn money? I’m not sure. Despite the massive changes happening around us, I didn’t sense hostility from the local Chinese. Life seemed to go on. And then, one day, everything changed.

…

It was the fall of 1945. I was playing outside in a courtyard with my friends, completely unaware of what was about to happen. Suddenly, my mother came running. There were tears in her eyes as she hugged me tightly. ‘Your father’s been arrested.’ I didn’t understand. He was often away from home – wasn’t this just another one of those times? The drama of the moment blurred even more the next day, when my father returned – escorted by two Soviet officers in uniform. They weren’t aggressive. They didn’t shout. They were calm, formal. They told me they had brought my father so I could say goodbye. I still didn’t grasp what that meant. At that age, I admired soldiers. Their uniforms, their posture – they seemed powerful, fascinating. I didn’t realize then that I could be seeing my father for the last time.

…

By then, it was warm outside – probably March or April 1946. Anna and I had regained consciousness in the hospital. But we were weak, frail and starving. I couldn’t even stand. The first time I tried to get up, I collapsed. My legs wouldn’t hold me. I could only crawl.

We were given very little food – they said that after typhoid fever, the body couldn’t handle large meals. But hunger doesn’t care about medical explanations. It consumes you. It burns inside you. It’s a feeling you never forget for the rest of your life. And then – something unexpected happened. One day, a visitor arrived at the hospital – Larysa Ogienko, my former drawing teacher. She was around 30 years old, with golden hair. She wasn’t just a friendly face – she had brought food. And more than that – she fed us. I asked about my mother, but she didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Because what she did next saved our lives. After we were discharged from the hospital, she took us both into her home.

Larysa lived with her mother, whom I would soon call Babuszka [grandmother in Russian, AD]. She was without a doubt the most caring, loving person – and in the near future, she would become our only protector.

…

Then, one day, an American soldier arrived at Larysa’s home. His name was Henry, and he asked me a single question: ‘Would you like to go to Poland?’

The answer was obvious. I would go anywhere – as long as it meant escaping. At that time, a few Americans had arrived in Changchun. The city had briefly been retaken by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army, pushing back Mao Zedong’s forces. Henry and others like him were working with UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and the International Red Cross, searching for people who wanted to be repatriated from China. Everything happened quickly. Mao’s troops were preparing to encircle the city again, and it was only a matter of time before they stormed back in. Among the few belongings I managed to take with me was my father’s collection of postage stamps, acquired during his time in Manchuria.

In May 1947, we boarded a DC-10 aircraft with Major Henry, departing from Nanking (Nanjing). We spent a few days there, though I learned only later that it was in Nanking that the Polish consul had issued us passports. I still have mine to this day. It was also there, on a beach by the Chinese sea, that I tasted something extraordinary for the first time – an ice-cold Coca-Cola. The next flight took us to Shanghai, and I quickly discovered that early aircraft had a terrifying flaw – whenever they hit thinner air, they would suddenly drop, plummeting before stabilizing again.

The feeling was horrible, but after a few days of travel, we grew attached to Henry. And then – another unexpected separation. In Shanghai, Henry was not allowed to continue with us. Instead, we were placed in the care of another American – Erling Logan. At first, I felt uneasy, even afraid. Henry had been our guardian, our protector – who was this stranger? But the fear didn’t last long. Erling Logan wasn’t just kind and protective – in some ways, he reminded me of my father. Even his age was similar.

We stayed with Erling in a luxurious hotel, a stark contrast to everything I had known. It was blisteringly hot, and to our surprise, taking a hot bath turned out to be the best way to cool down. For the first time in a long while, I felt safe.

…

In June 1947, we boarded the SS Marine Lynx – our final passage out of China. Our cabin housed four people: me, Anna, a German woman, and her young child. Meanwhile, Erling Logan was in charge of the entire transport of about 700 emigrants to Europe. We saw him only occasionally, as he was busy overseeing the journey. The voyage from Shanghai to Naples, Italy, lasted nearly two months, but despite its length, it was anything but boring. The sailors created a small pool for the children, stretching canvas to form a makeshift basin where we could splash and cool off.

…

The last leg of our journey took us by train to Warsaw, arriving at the Main Railway Station. From there, we rode in a horse-drawn carriage to Hotel Polonia, where we spent our final night together with Erling. The next morning, on 7 September 1947, we traveled to Anin, to the home of my aunt – my father’s sister. Our return to Poland was even mentioned in the newspaper Wieczór (Evening). And then – it was time to say goodbye to Erling. I was not happy about it. Once again, I felt that I was being handed off like an object, given away to someone I barely knew. I only learned many years later that Erling wanted to adopt us. He had no children of his own and had grown deeply attached to Anna and me. But to make it official, he needed my aunt’s permission. And she refused. At the time, I thought I was saying goodbye to Erling forever. There was no reason to believe our paths would ever cross again. And for years, with no word from him, rumours even surfaced that he had died during the Korean War.

After returning to Poland, I found myself in the home of my extended family. We lived in a modest apartment with my aunt and uncle, Irena and Wacław, along with their four children – Hanna (born 1934), Jan (1936), Tadeusz (born 1945) and Marek (born 1946). Also living with us was Aunt Wilunia (my grandmother’s sister) and her daughter. For a child, adaptation is instinctive. The will to survive is powerful, and at a young age, the mind is still flexible. Within a few weeks, I regained my ability to speak Polish, and soon I began making new friends.

…

In early spring of 1954, some family friends in Anin mentioned that they had received a letter from my father. I was stunned.

Why had they not shown us the letter? It seemed impossible that my father could be alive. Then, about a month later, a phone call came from the local post office. I picked up the receiver. And on the other end, I heard my father’s voice. He asked for directions to where we lived, and we arranged to meet at the crossroads near our house.

And just like that, it happened. He walked toward us as we approached from the opposite direction. He was thin, unshaven and wore a quilted jacket and trousers. His entire life’s belongings were packed in a bundle slung over his back. It’s impossible to describe the feeling of that moment. It was so unreal that none of us could fully comprehend it at first. For nearly eight years, my father had no idea whether we were alive. For nearly eight years, we had no idea that he was alive.

…

I was fortunate to preserve my father’s handwritten biography, written by him in 1954. From this document, I was able to reconstruct key moments of his life.