Nerd? Geek? (source: Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik)
If you follow this column (and if you don't, ty ty ty jeden), you will recall that in recent weeks we've examined Slovak words that don't exist in English, and words easily confused when translating from one language to the other.
The time has come to investigate those English words that don't have satisfactory equivalents in Slovak.
The English language has roughly 900,000 words, while Slovak has roughly 700,000, according to Juraj Dolník, professor at Comenius University's Slovak language department.
Unfortunately, and in spite of appeals from readers, the editors haven't granted me enough space to treat that many.
It's all to the good, anyhow, since it's not words like fricasseed, chinook and simulacrum that I missed when learning Slovak, but low American slang, like jerk, dork and cool.
The ethos of US egalitarianism goes hand in hand with the right to make snap social judgements about anyone, anytime. It was thus discouraging to discover no Slovak vernacular for sissy, wussy or mama's boy, or on the other hand, for hard-core or tough. The best I could do was slabý and zbabelec (lit. weak and coward) and tvrdý and silný (lit. hard and strong).
The tallest stumbling block was cool, a word I use 100 times a day back home. The cool that belongs to the young, not-our-parents generation. Cool like Pulp Fiction is cool, like Frank Zappa's music is cool, like velvet pants are cool. I spent a year puzzling over what Slovak word to use when cool popped into my head, usually frowning and settling on dobrý (good).
Two weeks ago I compared cool to perfektný, a far more enthusiastic compliment than dobrý. But perfektný ultimately fails because it is used by all generations of Slovaks, and because its trisyllabic singsong is just not cool.
We foreigners are left with a choice between finding an entirely different adjective for a pair of velvet pants and Frank Zappa's CD's and Pulp Fiction, using the wanting perfektný (all of whose connotations you won't get), or sticking to the self-gratifying cool (all of whose connotations your Slovak friends won't get).
