Nothing Polish has happened of late. I have returned at odd hours to the exercises in my first-year text and move through them slowly but not unsurely. I surprise myself on occasion by remembering some obscure linguistic datum—the city, Kielce, is actually a plural noun and takes a plural verb, sa, “are,” as in “Kielce are to the northeast of Krakow.” The closest words in the dictionary are kieliszek, “various glassware devoted to the drinking of alcohol”—wineglass, shot glass, snifter—and kiel, but with a barred l, “canines, eyeteeth, fangs, tusks.” According to Wikipedia, Kielce derives from the latter, some myth about a Polish king who dreams about tusks, finds some in the vicinity, and rededicates the site to animal dentition. Somehow the reality of drinking appeals to me more.
Otherwise, I prepare my house for auction during this sweltering July. A homebody, a householder catching up on twenty years of deferred maintenance has little time for the life of a Polish mind.
