potrzebie

[RSRICHMOND@xxxxxxx]

Dennis wrote:

>>Even further afield. Can anyone tell me what the Polish word "potrzebie" 
means? English-speakers pronounce this word, used in the adolescent humor 
magazine MAD, "pah-tur-ZEE-bee", but the Poles pronounce it "poh-CHEB-yeh".<<

I blush to admit that I'm old enough to remember the early 1950's MAD comic 
book that got afoul of the crazy psychiatrist Fredric ("Seduction of the 
Innocent") Wertham and re-emerged as the present magazine. MAD used to run 
pages, totally without explanation, in foreign languages, and words from 
those pages sometimes crept into the surrounding copy, also quite without 
explanation.

Potrzebie was the most durable of these words, lasting perhaps five years 
before they killed it, also without explanation, around 1959. Kids usually 
pronounced it pot-ra-ZEE-bie. I recall looking it up in a Polish dictionary 
back then, and finding that it was the accusative case of a noun meaning 
"want" or "need".

Bob Richmond
Samurai Pathologist
Knoxville, Tennessee