Fraz. zbić z pantałyku ‘stropić kogo, pozbawić pewności siebie’
The phrase zbić z pantałyku ‘to perplex, shatter somebody’s confidence’

Summary/Abstract: The article concerns the East-­Slavic linguistic influence on Polish in the second half of the nineteenh century as exemplified by the meaning of the phrase zbić z pantałyku. Today’s meaning of the phrase is associated with another phraseologism zbić z tropu ‘to throw [lit. knock] off trace,’ which originates from the hunting jargon. *Pantałyk as a separate word is not (and never has been) used in general Polish, and the comprehensibility of the whole phrase is the result of the sum of its components. East Slavic counterparts of the phrase are attested from the mid­nineteenth century. In the Polish of the period, zbić z pantałyku had a colloquial status, and its usefulness in the sphere of everyday communication was a manifestation of economy of imaginary rather than conceptual means of expression. Especially in the conditions of widespread bilingualism, the new phrase could easily be recognized against the background of contemporary usage of near­synonymous colloquial phrases derived from the verb zbić ‘to beat’ but also ‘to knock off.’ The greater frequency of zbić z pantałyku in the Polish of south­eastern borderlands resulted from a combination of factors, mainly the blurred boundaries between literary and dialectal (folk) phraseology.

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