Ty jsi taky nácek: Jak se ze silných slov středoevropských dějin staly nadávky
You’re a Nazi too: How powerful words from Central European history became insults

Summary/Abstract: The dynamics of twentieth-century events left their imprint on the lexicon of the languages of Central Europe and beyond: the emergence of new words, loanwords including internationalisms, and changes in word usage reflecting shifts in political regimes and society. Strong concepts such as fascism, Nazism, communism, Marxism and others have undergone significant development since their emergence and original usage, not only in the Czech language. This development reflects both, the changing socio-historical context—of which these words are salient lexical representatives—and the pragmatic component of their meaning. This paper aims to capture these two different developmental paths of change: (a) the broadening of meaning beyond its original encyclopedic sense, and (b) the strengthening of the pragmatic component of meaning. The first path includes cases where fascist is used to label adherents of any extremist ideology, not necessarily fascism in its original sense or that associated with the Second World War; the second involves cases where fascist denotes a person whose views or actions are perceived as extreme or disagreeable. The paper presents significant occurrences of these words in recent Czech media discourse, with an emphasis on the analogous contemporary social and political situation in Central European countries, primarily Slovakia and Hungary. Semantic shifts in Czech are illustrated by recent collocations of these expressions (e.g. duhový fašista [rainbow fascist], korporátní fašista [corporate fascist], azovský nacista [Azov Nazi]—in connection with Russia’s war in Ukraine since 2022) as recorded in the Czech National Corpus. In addition to this semantic broadening, these words, as linguistic data and public debates expose, are increasingly functioning as expressive units with an invective function. Using these lexical units such as seemingly intellectually charged invectives may serve to preserve the speaker’s face.

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