People celebrate World Greetings Day on Monday. This may surprise you, but in Czech we have dozens of expressions for them. People all over the world celebrate the holiday, which is not very well known in our country, by having to greet at least ten strangers on the street.
“God forbid” or maybe “good job”. This is only a small part of historical greetings. The longest used include “good day” and “hello”.
“We adopted the greeting ‘hoj’ into Czech from English. It is a continuation or continuation of the expression ‘hoj’, which means boat or boat in English, but at the same time ‘hoj’ is also an English interjection . , like we have in Czech, for example, ‘hey’,” explains Klára Dvořáková of the Czech Language Institute.
However, regions also have special expressions for greetings. Local surveys show that the most common greetings in Prague are hello, hello or good afternoon. In Brno, one of the most common greetings is zdarec, and locals also refer to zdar as svi*a”.
Either way, greetings are polite. As a general rule, the less important socially always greets the more important, men should greet women and younger should be older. “If we’re not sure who to greet first, the golden rule applies: the more polite one greets first,” suggested social etiquette popularizer Ladislav Špaček.
And on World Greetings Day, we must not forget about nonverbal greetings. While handshakes are commonplace in our country, for example the Eskimos rub their noses, in East Africa people spit each other’s feet. In Melanesia, they reach out to each other’s crotch when greeting. During the pandemic, a greeting was made where people touch their elbows.
kh, TN. cz
“Certified bacon geek. Evil social media fanatic. Music practitioner. Communicator.”
