The Czechs in a Nutshell

Ranking the participants from countries where “corruption is non-existent” to countries where it is “widespread”, TI deemed the Czech Republic to be the world’s 54th least corrupt state in 2003. That result places the country between Bulgaria and Belarus, which most Czechs take as a deep offence (see: Balkans). And even worse: the Czech Republic has experienced a continuous slide downwards since 1997, when it finished in 27th place. While post-communist countries such as Hungary and Slovenia traditionally were considered to be more sleaze-prone than the Czech Republic, the situation is now the reverse.

There is, however, a light in the darkness. It may be that corruption is perceived as such a big problem in the Czech Republic partly because the media — rightfully — have been focusing heavily on it in recent years.

Although corruption represents an undeniable problem, its spread may, because of the media focus, seem bigger than it really is. And even better: after years of neglecting the problem, EU accession has prompted the government to take action to fight sleaze, for instance by introducing state provocateurs as a method to reveal corrupt civil servants.

Certainly, corruption can also be seen as a question of political culture. In that respect, many experts must admit that their prophecies from the early 1990s were wrong.

Post-communist Central Europe has not been threatened by a revival of nationalism, as they warned. Neither has any hard-line communist comeback happened. The major problem for these new democracies is corruption and its tentacles wrapped around politicians. In this respect, one can say that the Czechs, after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 made a historic leap out of Moscow’s sphere of power. But when it comes to corruption, it might seem that they landed in Calabria...

Cursing

Just how foul-mouthed are the Czechs, and which weapons do they use? Generally speaking, most languages divide curse words into three groups: religious curses, expressions that relate to very private parts of the human body or its waste products, and those that describe all the peculiar things you can do with a close relative, most often your mother.

The Czech language, of course, is no exception. Blasphemy, as well as genitals and excrements, have traditionally been regarded as a taboo. However, the Czechs don’t necessarily perceive the “strength” of a certain taboo in the same way as, for instance, the Germans or the Russians. Thus, a given language’s register of curses and the focus of its obscenities reveal quite a lot about the mental hierarchy of its speakers.

As in English, religious curses are regarded as the mildest ones also in Czech. Exclamations such as sakrament, Ježíš Maria, krucifix and the originally German herrgott or himmelherrgott were once a safe way of evoking the wrath of the heavens — and the church — and therefore extremely well-suited as taboo words. But thanks to the declining role of religion, a phenomenon that has taken place all over Europe, but especially among the Czechs (see: Battle of White Mountain), these curse words have lost their force more or less completely.

Zatraceně (damned) is reduced to a literary expression, and some of the other religious taboo words have even been further trivialized into sakra and krucinál. It’s also worth noticing that the Czech equivalents of devil — dábel and čert — never became popular as curses (while they are very frequent in Russian). Čert is perceived as a rather nice figure from fairy tales, while peklo (hell) is not a place where a Czech would send people he or she doesn’t like.

This may suggest two things: either that the Czechs think Earth is bad enough, or, in what may be the more plausible explanation, that they haven’t found the Catholic Church even worthy of offence.

Same thing goes for the use of fuck. While vulgar (American) English uses it in every other sentence, it’s almost totally absent in Czech (but widespread among Czech Roma!). There are, of course, several vulgar verbs for this activity (mrdat, šukat, šoustat), but they very seldom appear in a defaming or negative context. In other words, the Czechs take some activities really seriously...

On the other hand, the Czechs are extremely happy to fill this gap with the word kurva (whore). So expressions like: Co to kurva má znamenat? or Šéf je zkurvenej hajzl correspond fully to English What the fuck/hell is this supposed to mean?, and The boss is a fucking ass-hole.