Slovak Matters: Flu season, aches, and remedies

In Slovak, you don't have a sore throat but the throat pains you. For a remedy, have you tried the drink with bacon grease, caramel, and slivovica?

(Source: Image by wayhomestudio on Freepik)

The cold of winter has arrived in Slovakia, and with it the first kýchania (achews) of the winter cold season.

The good news is that Slovaks are a solicitous people, especially when confronted by chorí (the ill). But if you want to cash in on free over the counter drugs from neighbours and doctor notes excusing you from work for weeks at a time (ospravedlnenka), you'll have to learn to name what ails you.

Chrípka is the flu, although it sounds more like a small bird to me. Nádcha is the common cold, hnačka diarrhoea and horúčka a fever. Stuffy nose (plný nos) nearly translates literally, and kašeľ is a cough. (The verb kašľať also means to disregard something, as in "Kašlem na to. Už na tom pracujem 14 hodín. Idem domov." [I don't give a damn anymore. I've been working on this for 14 hours. I'm going home.])

Headaches and throat aches and every other kind of ache are handled by the verb bolieť, to experience pain. Bolieť is a little tricky because it takes as its subject the cause of the pain and as its object the sufferer of the pain, as in bolí ma hrdlo (lit. the throat hurts me).

I raise the point to illustrate a broader peculiarity: Slovak - especially where the body is affected - has an abundance of such phrases in which the emphasis is placed on the event happening to the individual. It's almost as if people are victims to their bodies (pichá ma v bruchu, lit. it stabs me in the stomach, meaning I have stabbing pains in my stomach), possessions (spadlo mi pero, lit. my pen fell to me, meaning my pen fell) and surroundings (je mi teplo, lit. it is to me hot, meaning I am hot).

This takes a little getting used to for the native English speaker, who expects his nose to run, not his nose to run to him (tečie mu nos), his head to ache, not his head to ache him (bolí ma hlava) and that he feels sick, not that it be sick to him (je mi zle, lit. it is to me bad).

You'll need to develop a feel for this just to say I'm cold (je mi zima, lit. it is to me cold). Slangier expressions include drgľuje ma (lit. it is shaking me) and the perplexing je mi kosa (lit. it is to me a scythe.) Zima ako v Rusku (cold as a Russian winter) and studený ako psí čumák (cold as a dog's sniffer) are grammatically simpler but equally piquant ways of saying the same thing.

If the cold manages to get under your fingernails (zima sa mi dostala pod nechty), as Slovaks say, and you catch a cold (prechladnúť), you'll have to rely on over the counter drugs that can be quite different to what you're used to at home. I recently took something for my stomach called čierne uhlie. It turned out to be plain old-fashioned charcoal. The old standbys aspirin (acylpirín) and Ibuprofen (ibuprofén) are available for combating pain but the Slovak favourite is paracetamol, of the brand name Paralen. Slovaks consider the cure for all nameless ills to take two Paralen and go to bed.

If the pills don't help, you're at the mercy of a nearly bankrupt medical system and the theories of well-meaning friends. For every illness there are a hundred Slovak home remedies (ľudová liečba). I am inclined to label most of these old wives' tales (recepty starých mám), yet in recent days I had a strong horúčka broken by a recept starých mám that required me to lay in a cocoon of soaking-wet towels for nearly an hour. It was to me scythe, but it worked.

Slippers (papuče) are Slovaks first and last line of defence against getting sick. There is a saying that it is conceivable for a Norwegian to have a sauna and no house but not a house without a sauna. I think you can safely substitute the word Norwegian for Slovak and the word sauna for 'heaping pile of multi-coloured, multi-sized slippers'. Good news for your feet, but a strain on your Slovak, since the language has separate words for taking off (vyzuť sa) and putting on (obuť sa) footwear. A typical exchange:

Nemusíš sa vyzúvať...

(You don't have to take off your shoes.)

Ale aspoň si obuj papuče...

(Well at least put on slippers)

One of my favourite Slovak winter words is palčiaky, which means mittens (palec means thumb). The all-time best winter Slovak word, however, is hriatô. The ô is pronounced like 'whoa', which reminds me of the America cartoon character Elmer Fudd, who pronounced his R's as W's.

In the Liptov region, a dialect is still spoken in which hundreds of words end in ô. It's pwiceless.

Hriatô, incidentally, is a winter drink of white alcohol (typically vodka or slivovica) boiled with bacon grease, caramel and water, served hot and purported to be healthy.

Enjoy the word, enjoy the hriatô, and don't forget to wear papuče.


This story was first published by The Slovak Spectator on December 10, 2001. We have updated the piece to make it relevant for today.

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