notes from the waiting room

here's a story i overheard in a hospital waiting room today:

...and he stole my bag! i mean tried to, because he must've been the unluckiest thief ever. grabbed my bag and yanked it and took off with it, and all i had time to do was yell, "THIEF!" it was by the small canal, you see, that he was running. such bad luck he had, hitting head on some guy who was coming down this way, and he - that other guy, that is - turned out to be some marshal arts champion or whatever, and so i got my bag back right away... and nothing missing!
oh, i am so shaken still. it was yesterday, but you know, a trauma like this will stick around for a while...


i thought this was a pretty good story for a lower middle-class lady in her fifties... just hope she doesn't hold the copyrights.

contemplations on linguistic complexity

every now and then i'm asked whether polish is a difficult language. being a native speaker, my first answer is "no, of course it's the easiest one there is!"  however, a scratch on the surface of plurals and number forms reveals a tangle of craziness you might not want to keep scratching. here's a sample:


"Mozart" - singular. 
plural: depends on what you are talking about.
- if you mean the family (as in "the Mozarts") - Mozartowie
- if you wish to use Mozart's name for high class musicians of a certain era (as in "the Mozarts of our day") - Mozarci
- if you're talking about the music award (like the academy award in film) - Mozarty
mind you, these are all in the nominative. each of our nouns declines in 7 cases.


try numbers...
two:
feminine (two girls, two lamps, two female cats, etc.) - dwie
masculine (two boys, two plumbers) - dwóch
non-masculine (two dogs, two tables) - dwa
neutral (two children, two doors; also a mixed gender pair of humans) - dwoje
adjectives also decline in 7 cases...


hats off to any foreigner who takes up this language. seriously.

random snowthoughts

have you ever stared into falling snow until you saw its depth in space, its three-dimensionality? all that fluffy wetness, softly coming down in the dark. so pretty. i wondered today, while it felt like hundreds of tender wet fingertips on my face - what was it the last time it was a liquid? and how far did it travel to make our winter wonderland?