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Jadwiga | 25 | Poland sideblog | Main: @vigilantsycamore | Any pronouns | Aborcja Bez Granic (Abortion Without Borders): [phone] | I stand with Ukraine | Antifa means Anti-Fascists | Black Lives Matter | Trans rights are human rights

[spaghetti-polonaise]

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About Me:

I’m Jadwiga! My main blog is @vigilantsycamore, and this is my sideblog for stuff relating to Poland, or to Central and Eastern Europe in general

I'm 25, queer, probably-autistic, and - surprise surprise - Polish (living in the UK). I'm fine with any pronouns - in English or Polish - as long as you're not using them in an asshole way, and any gendered terms except "man" and "woman".

Links:

Here’s the link to support JCC Krakow, the largest Jewish Community Centre in Poland right now.

Campaign Against Homophobia is one of the main LGBT+ rights organizations in Poland

Grupa Granica and Fundacja Ocalenie are two organizations involved in helping refugees in Poland.

Notes From Poland is a good resource for English-language news about events in Poland

I may add other links here as time goes on.

Tags:

These are all tags you can expect me to be using on here:

“#polskie rzeczy” for generally Poland-related stuff

“#poland lgbt+” and “#polska lgbt+” are fairly self-explanatory, as are “#jewish poles” and “#jewish polish community”

“#slavic stuff” for posts that are generally Slavic in some way

“#cee stuff” for posts about topics relating to central and eastern europe

#jadwiga speaks for my opinionated posting

I have other tags but those are my most frequently-used ones at the moment

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[redstonedust]

i think being proud of where you come from is one of those things that becomes fun the more specific you get. like "proud to be english" bad rancid vibes. makes you sound like the kind of person who rants about immigrants. "proud to be from yorkshire" better vibes. i cannot deny the yorkshire cultural heritage. "proud to be from pocklington" absolutely fucking hilarious please never let anybody kill your pocklington pride.

[redstonedust]

i love the USA: weird vibes. dont trust that.

i love muskegon michigan: you are experiencing a kind of personal joy that i can and will not take from you

[negativesanchez]

[universeleads]

I explained the concept of "blorbo from my shows" to my 71 year old immigrant grandfather because I referenced it in passing and I thought nothing of it, until today when he said "I think I'll watch peaky blinders tonight and see my blorbo from my shows" referring, of course, to Cillian Murphy playing Tommy Shelby

[universeleads]

English isn't his first language so he's not super in touch with modern slang, so I've been accidentally teaching him to talk like a tumblr user. His favorite thing to say lately is "me when I'm a little hater" when he's like talking shit about the neighbor's son

[overwhelmedfernfrond]

I explained the “x before gta6” meme to my immigrant father and he, in turn, explained to me how back in his day in Romania, they had the same type of joke, except instead of it being gta6, it was about the imminent death of a singer named Gică Petrescu, who everyone was continuously shocked by because he refused to die. Every time a momentous event happened people would say, in essence: “This happened and Gică Petrescu hasn’t even died yet?!?”

So. He understood the gta6 meme immediately because they apparently had the same thing in Romania when he was young, except way, way more morbid

[aomitois]

rb and tag your favorite song that's not in english, japanese or korean

[vigilantsycamore]

i love coining words. i'm like some sort of wordcoiner. or perhaps a coinword

[spaghetti-polonaise]

może po polsku słowotwórc

[napalmdebt]

[transcaptainleviathan]

happy pride to my jewtuals and any queer jews this comes across :)

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

Levels of understanding other slavic languages

oh we also have X and it means the same!

that looks like X but misspelled

that's just the archaic variant of X

this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X

this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology

what

okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal

I wanted to ask for X and accidentally called someone a whore

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

I don't even have to look at the blog and I just know this is from a Pole about Czechs

suffering

[byrons]

KAKAOVY CHLEBICEK???!!!???

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

hissing growling scratching you etc etc

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

for example

(Polish: are you looking for a squirrel?, Slovak: excuse me, he is doing what to the squirrel?)

(also "hladna pića" means "cold drinks" in Croatian. means "hungry cunt" in Slovak and Czech)

("you're weird" in Czech is the same as "you're amazing" in Croatian, while "you're amazing" in Czech is the same as "you're terrible" in Croatian)

[poetka]

My favourite recent-ish example of #8:

[visloka]

[czto-nebud-blog]

Don't forget this:

And of course pomoć (help) vs pomoč (ordering you to piss on something)

[czto-nebud-blog]

Also remembered this shop from my trip to Croatia (piko means meth in czech and slovak)

[kaazdalena]

przepraszam w CZYM ta restauracja????

[axolotl-anemonoides]

This reminds me of that time my (Czech) family went to Poland for my uncle's wedding (because my aunt - his wife - is Polish and they decided to get married in Poland).

The wedding afterparty was in full swing, everyone was drinking and partying.... and an elderly Polish lady approached my two aunts (who were also drinking a lot and partying hard) and commented something along the lines of "jesteście odporne". Which in Polish means "you're resilient" (as in they're handling the alcohol well) but in Czech it means "you're disgusting".

It took my aunts a bit to remember that it means something different in Polish. 😅

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

another beautiful case of n.8 from @someidioticurl

Czech vision: ah yes an emergency button to press in case of emergency

Polish vision:

[ta-bajna-cerna-okybaca]

Oh, I have a few!

'pozor' in Czech means 'watch out!', but means 'shame' in Russian

droga in czech means drug, in polish it means road

záchod in czech means toilet, zachód in polish means 'west'

odchod 'to depart' in Czech means very specifically 'to depart by foot', while in Slovak it has a bit wider meaning, and buses and trains also combine with 'odchod'. To a Czech speaker this gives the funny implication that departing trains grow legs and walk out of the train station

Croatian 'mrdati' = to wiggle, means 'to have sex' in Czech

'Čerstvý, voňavý chléb' is Czech for 'fresh, nicely smelling bread'. In means the opposite in some slavic languages 'stale, stinky bread'. This kind of 'good meaning in one but bad meaning in other' duality happens surprisingly often actually, see also úžas and odporný above

otrok in Czech means 'slave' but in Slovenian and perhaps other South slavic languages it means 'child'. Very funny when combined with bazaar, turns a perfectly fine baby bazar into a slave bazaar

My friend has a fun sentence from Slovenian - "Hitri otroci kuhali jed na Dunaji". Literally none of the words here mean what a Czech thinks they mean. No not even Dunaj. Czechs read it as 'smart slaves were disemboweling poison by the Donau river', original Slovenian meaning is 'fast children were cooking food in Vienna'

Edit: wait one more. "srpanj" in Croatian means July, "srpen" in Czech means August. Listopad in Croatian means 'October', in Czech means 'November'. rujan in Croatian means 'September', říjen in Czech means 'October'. kwiecień in Polish means 'April', kviteń in Ukrainian also means 'April', květen in Czech means 'May'. Months are fucked up.

[alexaloraetheris]

Slavic languages is what happened when God decided that the Tower of Babel was getting too tall.

[rithalie-sideblog]

And he spinned it like a code puzzle before that, just for good measure.

[maimonideznuts]

As someone who doesn't speak or read Polish... I'm very upset by the sound this makes "ł". What do mean a wuh sound?

I just remembered you gave us Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie and have realised that I am actually using the inferior language to write this post.

[spaghetti-polonaise]

ł used to be a sound called a "dark l" and it still sounds that way in some older dialects, but in most dialects of Polish it shifted to a "wuh" sound... mid-20th century, I think? It's a fairly recent sound change

[polishwave]

[savyir-genesizz-the-wizard]

[Polish. A red writing on the wall saying "no smoking" changed to "beating meat compulsory" with a black sharpie]

[krakenpocalypse]

@vigilantsycamore

[spaghetti-polonaise]

XD

[kimmycup]

Like I don't think you guys comprehend what happened in Poland just now but everyone needs to be talking about it.

A random influencer decided he'll listen to an anti cancer song on loop. People liked it enough times he ended up listening for 9 days.

He raised 90 million in these 9 days, and then 160 million more over the last 10 hours, for a total of 250 million.

Hundreds and thousands of people signed up to donate marrow.

Hundreds of celebrities shaved their heads in solidarity.

The Foundation receiving this money had to create a special commission to figure out how to distribute the money.

The national TV stations got highjacked to stream this for hours because it was better news than anything happening in the world.

Because we broke and DOUBLED the world record for this kind of thing.

They raised about as much as the biggest running charity event in Poland did in a whole year with three decades of tradition and a goddamn army of people.

And they did it on a goddamn amateur set up in a shabby room sitting on folding chairs.

[kimmycup]

Little update: people keep donating despite the stream being over. We're at 280 million in the fight against cancer.

Łatwogang refuses to collab with companies that only reached out to him now because of popularity or give interviews. He said any medals people wanna give them should go to the doctors and nurses and the cancer patients.

Someone offered to renovate that shabby little flat for him as a thank you. He refused.

Someone counted up how many people appeared in that room during the whole thing - it was 319 total.

[belladonna-rx]

Love to hear it. Love news articles too.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/polish-nine-day-charity-stream-breaks-records-support-kids-with-cancer-2026-04-27/

Just love this headline phrasing.

Streamer crushes MrBeast charity record with $70 million raised for kids with cancer - Dexerto

Polish streamer Łatwogang’s charity livestream has raised over 203 million złoty for children with cancer, breaking the charity stream recor

[folklorespring]

Workers' Day parade, May 1, 1986, Kyiv, 5 days after Chornobyl disaster. Soviet authorities insisted on mass events and concealed what actually happened at the Chornobyl NPP, creating an illusion that it was a minor accident that was taken care of. Thousands of people took part in the celebrations while the wind was carrying a radioactive cloud toward Kyiv.

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

Want to hear a joke that isn’t funny?

Today, Russia celebrates Cosmonautics Day, honouring the space exploration led by the Ukrainian Serhiy Korolyov—the man the USSR repressed  for his genius.

🚩 The reality of his identity

Serhiy Korolyov was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. He always identified as Ukrainian, even explicitly stating his Ukrainian nationality in official Soviet questionnaires. While Moscow claims his success today, they spent years trying to break his spirit and his body.

⛏️ Survival in the Gulag

In 1938, the NKVD broke his jaw during "interrogations" and sent him to the brutal Kolyma gold mines. He only survived because the regime realized they needed his brain to build rockets, moving him to a "sharashka"—a prison for scientists.

🩺 A tragic end

The Soviet state literally killed him. In 1966, Korolyov died during surgery because doctors couldn’t intubate him. His jaw, broken by Soviet guards decades earlier, had never healed properly, making a routine procedure impossible.

🚀 Modern-day hypocrisy

Today, Russia puts Korolyov’s face on posters while bombing Zhytomyr, his birthplace. They claim a "Russian" space race, but it was built by a Ukrainian man who loved his land, a man they tortured, using technology developed in Dnipro, Ukraine.

Russia didn’t conquer space. A Ukrainian man gave them the stars, and the empire gave him a prison cell in return. Now Russia is destroying his homeland whilst cynically ‘honouring’ the name of a Ukrainian. By the way, they stole him too, trying to claim everywhere that he was Russian.

[sapper-in-the-wire]

[animelionessmika]

[borg-collective-deactivated2023]

[sillyrebloggingacc]

[spaghetti-polonaise]

The more languages you know the more likely it is that you'll come across someone talking about a thing that has a normal/innocuous/meaningless name in one language but looks exactly the same as one of your languages' word for "I'm shitting"

It's a disorienting experience but I'm actually thankful for it because I'm the type of person who gets anxious about accidentally giving a sci-fi/fantasy faction a name that means something Bad in a language I don't speak, and this experience seems to have alleviated that fear somewhat

[moved-someidioticurl]

I might or might not be staring at the German company producing light bulbs called... Osram

[spaghetti-polonaise]

i was in my local polish shop yesterday and i saw a label that said "zupa botwinka" (beetroot soup) but i wasn't paying attention so i thought it said "zupa do twinka" (soup for the twink)