The Plague Comes and Goes: Thinking about Epidemic Diseases as Recorded in Language

Abstract

In this article, I present selected aspects of the linguistic image of the plague (I am especially interested in names and their etymology, the causes of the disease, images of the plague, and remedies). I mainly rely on materials related to Polish folk culture, but I also mention some contemporary contexts to show a certain durability of beliefs related to the plague. I use the notion of a linguistic and cultural image of the world understood as a colloquial interpretation of reality that can be explicated not only using verbal data, but also with non-verbal data preserved in petrified texts of culture. In my considerations, I refer to the so-called cognitive definition. The material basis of the analysis presented (in line with Jerzy Bartmiński’s assumptions) consists of lexical and textual data: names (confirming the “perspective of reality”), information transmitted on an onomasiological basis, revealed in the etymological and word-formation analysis, meanings given in the definitions in Polish and dialectal dictionaries, word-formation derivatives, metaphorical extensions, phraseologisms, collocations (phrases), metaphors, proverbs, healing formulas, etc. In Polish folk culture, the plague was imagined as a living creature (woman) who could roam the land (come and go), come to the village, talk to people, put them to death, or save the ones she chose to live. These images of the plague made peasants try to secure their space and to create a safe zone for themselves and their community by means of various magical procedures.