Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/500

Home Journal,” however, there is an article by Mrs. Booth Tarkington: “We Needn’t be Robots in Our Dress.”

Pantáta (pan, mister + táta, father) is the Czech word for father-in-law. It is used occasionally in the sense of “my good man,” or “an old man.” The Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary gives the derivation correctly, but only the meaning: “(Slang U. S.) One having authority; a boss.” Moreover, it places the accent on the second syllable, probably through confusion of accent with the diacritical mark on the second a. It is possible that the Americans who used the word in the sense given misplaced the accent, but I rather think they would not have done so had they ever heard it from a Bohemian. The accent belongs, of course, on the first syllable. Mr. Thomas Čapek says of pantáta that it is the only Czech word that has thus far made itself at home in the English language, and adds that “as understood in New York, where the word was first used in 1894, at the time of the Lexow Committee trial, it signifies a corrupt police captain.” ^[1] With all due regard for the Standard Dictionary and Mr. Čapek, I fear that pantata, if not already obsolete, is not destined to remain permanently in the American vocabulary. In the first place, in the significance of boss, it is Bohemian, as well as U. S., slang. Applied to a corrupt police captain, nothing could be farther from the original meaning of the word. At best it can only be regarded as a localism, and, in this respect, some of the other words I have discussed in this article are equally, if not more, worthy of recognition.

Returning, for a moment, to the matter of words picked up by children: it is not likely that any of these will be taken permanently into the American vulgate, but stranger things have happened. One Czech verb, sočiti (to scold, grumble,) seems to have impressed American children who have heard it from their Bohemian playmates, and they have made it over into “to soč,” with the meanings to scold, grumble, mutter, be in bad humor, and, rarely, to hiss. I have heard it in various localities: “What is he soč-ing about?” “Mamma is sure going to soč when she finds out;” “The teacher soč-ed because I was late;” and, in reference to a noise a leaky lavatory pipe was making, “What is that water soč-ing about in there?” Other Bohemian verbs are sometimes conjugated in English if the speaker, child or adult, cannot think at the moment of the proper English word, but from its very nature this can