God vandel i hanseatisk tid

Eg har aldri tidlegare reflektert særleg over opphavet til ordet “vandel”, som syner seg både i omgrepet “god vandel” og i “forvandling”. Med det første omgrepet gjer ein uttrykk for at nokon har ført seg vel og godt, medan ein med det andre uttrykket seier at nokon eller noko har endra seg kraftig – og i følgje den gode ordboka er det óg det siste omgrepet som er nærast opphavet til dette ordet.

vandel | vandel -en (frå lty ‘endring’) framferd, livsførsel plettfri v- / handel og v- dagleg virke

forvandle | ~van’dle v1 (frå lty, sisteleddet smh med vandel) skape om, endre bli som forvandla etter kuren / f- seg

Eg vel difor å drodle med fram til at dette ordet har ramla inn i det norske språket i den godaste Hansatida, og at vi kan lese litt historie ut av det heile. Kvifor seier vi “du har endra deg godt” (les: “god vandel”) når vi skal seie at ein person oppfører seg eksemplarisk? Var det dette unge nordmenn måtte argumentere med når dei ønskte å mønstre på hanseatiske skip i Bergen?

Eg er ikkje lengre ein fiskeluktande fjellbonde – eg har god vandel!

Being beastly to the Poles

The European Voice (The Economists newspaper for Europe and the EU) wrote a comment (not quoting the author in that foolish Economist way) about the usage of the word “polack” in an english newspaper. The comment makes a fairly valid point about how it is more or less acceptable to down-talk the Poles in a very different way than many other population groups, finally concluding that the poles are not alone; Brits will be down-talking Germans in quite undecent ways too.

As a fun fact: The historical usage of the word “polack” in the english language is probably not very good, but in Polish this is exactly what a Pole is.. “Jestem Polakiem” – “I am a polack”. – This of course does not excuse the usage of words with bad connotations in the english language, though.

That aside, Poland do have a way to go in its holocaust-history. It seems to me that the country and its population has hid behind the fact that they resisted the German invasion fiercely during the war. They do not seem to feel the need to restore and/or keep alive the memory of one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe before 1939. You can travel around the country and find Jewish cemeteries overgrown and vandalised, and even memorial squares to the Holocaust, made into parking lots, while the statued and benched square right next to it commemorates the Polish nation. These examples are both from Tarnów, but they are not the only examples in existence.

Poland – a twenty year old country at the time – fought the Germans fiercely, and spent a lot of time after Solidarity contemplating the polish losses and the regrets toward the Western European countries, who sacrificed this proud people to the Red Army after the war, despite all their efforts. The Brits would not even give them reasonable credit for their sacrifice. But the Poles were fighting for the idea of Poland, a fight they had been fighting a long time.

It seems as if they have not been able to do the same contemplation over the loss of the largest minority group of the country. The Jewish population of Poland was one of the largest in all of Europe. And today anti-Semitic sentiment seems to me to be more obvious in Poland (as in some other Central- and Eastern European Countries) than in most Western European countries.

They need to do some common contemplation over this subject for a long time. Poland is a beautiful country (a bit stained, but still beautiful) and Polacks are a nice and polite people that I’ve grown very fond of. But you do not have to stay in this country for a long time to see that the Holocaust-stain on this countries history has not been treated especially well.