The polish bieda in language and culture

Abstract

The article is an attempt to reconstruct the most important elements of the linguisticcultural image of the Polish bieda ‘poverty, misery’, a theme very much present in academic reasearch and media coverage. The noun bieda is a component of many fixed word combinations, including two culturally-profiled collocations: polska bieda ‘the Polish poverty’ and stara bieda ‘same old misery’.

Following Jerzy Bartmiński’s methodological assumptions for reconstructing linguistic worldview, three types of data are taken into account: systemic (general, etymological, phraseological dictionaries of Polish, as well as dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms), textual (proverbs, folk tales, sample journalistic texts), and cultural (folk beliefs and customs described in ethnographic literature). In Polish, bieda is contrasted with wealth and is different from UBÓSTWO ‘poverty, deprivation’, which can be accepted voluntarily. The fact that the noun bieda collocates exclusively with intensifying adjectives suggests that speakers of Polish pay attention above all to the consequences of difficult financial situations. The process of euphemisation, in turn, is usually expressed with the formal word niedostatek ‘financial hardship’. Fixed word combinations show that bieda is portrayed as a distinct entity that accompanies human life, a living creature that appears against one’s will, an intruder, usually perceived as a person. The folk images of bieda, present in iconography and folk tales, are those of a skinny woman or a naked child. In some proverbs bieda is represented as a teacher who shows how to appreciate simple, everyday things in life. Other metaphors are based on the perception of bieda as a disease, an object, or a container.

In journalistic and scientific texts, bieda is treated as an enemy or threat to be opposed, in contrast to the fatalism of the folk worldview. In general, the notion of bieda is evaluated negatively.