Małe, czarne, okrągłe, a każdego wyszczypie. O pieprzu i pieprzeniu w polszczyźnie ludowej i potocznej
Small, black, and round, and yet it can pinch anyone. On pieprz ‘pepper’ and pieprzenie, lit. ‘peppering’, in folk and general varieties of Polish

Summary/Abstract: The first part of the article is devoted to a reconstruction, by means of the cognitive definition, of the linguo-cultural view of pepper in Polish folk culture. The rich body of 19th- and 20th-c. data comes from the files of the Dictionary of Folk Stereotypes and Symbols (text of folklore in a variety of genres, records of beliefs and cultural practices) as well as from dictionaries of Polish (general, dialectal, phraseological, and etymological). Pepper is imaged through language not only as a hot and bitter spice, formerly expensive and much desired, but also as a substance with several applications in medicine and magic. Because of its sharp taste, pepper also connotes such features as ‘malice’, ‘offense’, ‘indecency’, ‘vulgaritycoarseness’, ‘destruction’, or ‘stupidity’, which is especially conspicuous in the semantics of its many derivatives, mainly obscene expressions and swearwords such as pieprzyć ‘talk bullshit’ or ‘screw’, spieprzyć ‘screwfuck up’, zapieprzyć ‘steal’, wypieprzyć ‘dump’, etc. These are in focus in the second part of the article, where it is investigated how they are related to the linguo-cultural stereotype of pepper.

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