In Prague as it approaches its second millennium, nothing appears
to change faster than the past. The present, of course, has been in
a state of agitated flux for a decade. Hardly a week goes by that
does not produce a change, often to the baffled indignation of
Czechs. These changes range from the very look of long-familiar
streets to the language itself, increasingly a prey to slangy
neologisms. The restitution of confiscated real estate as well as
the incursions of foreign investors have made checkerboards of
neighborhoods that were neglected for over half a century. In the
neighborhood where we have been living, the nineteenth-century
middle-class district called Smíchov, street after street displays
the motley mosaic of freshly repainted facades alongside the sooty
and crumbling housefronts of those still too indigent to renovate;
the effect is incongruous, like seeing debutantes in bright ball
gowns amid throngs of disheveled crones. As for the language, Czechs
grumble but manage to subvert the intrusions of political
correctness even as these worm their way into daily converse. In the
1990s, with tedious inevitability, the term “sexual harassment”
entered the language and was rendered as sexuální
obte’z’ování.
Czechs, however, unofficially prefer the term sexuální
haras’ení,
coined by the novelist Josef
Skvoreckyï, because while the word
haras’ení sounds a little like harassment it also connotes a kind
of “rustling” or “scuttling,” as of a mouse in the attic. Such a
locution permits Czechs to be perfectly “correct” while at the same