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Historia „niewielkiego słowa”, czyli o przyzwoitości

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Karwatowska M.

Stylistyka

2018

vol. 27

87-103

The authoress focuses on the word przyzwoitość ‘decency, decorum, propriety’ and examines the term on the basis of the corresponding dictionary entries, from the oldest to the latest, PELCRA-searched concordances of the PWN Polish Language Corpus, and Lublin-based Maria Curie-Skłodowska University students’ questionnaire-derived responses. As she concludes, the word przyzwoitość has clearly been evolving. Not only has the number of its referents increased, but also its semantic centre has been slightly shifted. Most recently, the word has been used in some sense of ‘propriety’, that is ‘fitting’, ‘suitable’, or ‘the way that it should be’, which means that something is good/appropriate in some respect but is not of any extraordinary quality. Nevertheless, in reference to selected objects it does amount to more than just the expected norm, or, at least, it resides in the higher limit of normal. Przyzwoitość then implies ‘better than average’, something like norm plus supplementary value, never average or below average. As postulated, this secondary meaning of the word is now gaining popularity at the expense of the original one that embraces moral issues. The latter happens to be appropriated by other domains, which is what probably explains a growing capacity of przyzwoitoœæ to appear in novel idiomatic expressions.

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1 Stylistyka

1 Karwatowska M.

1 2018

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Historia „niewielkiego słowa”, czyli o przyzwoitości