Ożeż ty!, polszczyzno : wątpliwości użytkowników języka, wyjaśnienia lingwistyczne

OH YOU!, POLISH LANGUAGE: DOUBTS OF POLISH LANGUAGE USERS, LINGUISTIC EXPLANATIONS

This is an academic publication, which is a selection of specially written, elaborated (footnotes, a bibliography, a list of online sources, and a word index) and edited texts, then subjected to academic review, which appeared in a popular-science column on various aspects of correctness in Polish in the nationwide weekly Angora from 2019 to the first half of 2022.

All the author’s considerations and reflections on the most important lexical and grammatical phenomena in contemporary Polish were inspired by readers’ questions. These posed a considerable intellectual challenge for the author, sometimes forcing him to explore the deepest layers of earlier and more recent Polish.

The author takes great care to address every linguistic issue raised earlier by the readers in its explanation, referring to scholarly literature and dictionaries, and, when necessary, citing the opinions of lexicographers and linguistic experts on a given topic.

At the same time, he firmly believes that linguistic prescription makes sense only when the solution to a given linguistic dilemma is presented against a broader background revealing the mechanisms governing the Polish language. It may happen, after all, that a verdict of prescriptivists from years ago does not fit the contemporary reality. And is it then really necessary to insist that something is correct or not, while language use, or established linguistic custom, contradicts it?

Worthy of note is the title of the publication. It features the word ożeż written jointly and twice with ż. This is because, either alone or in combination with the pronoun ty ‘you’, it creates an expressive exclamation, that is, one in which there are two emphatic particles, although the second of them appears in a form reduced to ż, without e, because it stands after the vowel. Unfortunately, most of those who write about this orthographic norm do not know and have never heard of this, and therefore misspell the expression as o żesz.