On fools (or blockheads)

Hello and welcome to another edition of SoundCzech, our long-running language series in which you can learn Czech words or sayings through song lyrics. In today’s edition we’ll hear part of a song by the great Czech folksinger Jaromír Nohavica: the word to look out for is also the name of the song, Hlupáci, the plural of hlupák, the Czech equivalent of fool or dummy. If you say somebody is hloupý, you’re basically saying they’re not too bright - the light’s on but nobody’s home.

In the song Nohavica sings Za každého moudrého, jeden hlupák – for every smart person, there’s one fool. Certainly all of us, at one time or another, have come across someone who is basically clueless. Dumb and dumber. Really foolish. The successful Czech 1990s film, The Buttoners by Petr Zelenka, took the whole concept of the fool to new levels in a series of scenes entitled Pitomci – Idiots - in which the actor Rudolf Hrušínský plays a dummy of monumental proportions. His only talent in life is once in a while laying on the railway tracks and spitting on the train’s identification number as it passes overhead. You might say he was a – hlupák prvního řádu. A blockhead of the first order, a fool of the first water.

Rudolf Hrušínský in 'The Buttoners'

Of course, even those who are normally bright can be put in a situational disadvantage, where they come across as foolish, but there are others who never have an idea what’s really going on. One way of saying it in Czech, might be to say nemá šajna– he hasn’t a clue, or neví která bije (which implies someone is so dumb, they can’t even tell what time it is).

Hlupák dos not only have to always be used as a scathingly derisive term, if you use the diminutive hlupáček, which means silly billy. That’s something a girl may tell her boyfriend when he’s gone out of his way to set something right, running across the city in the pouring rain and getting into a series of misadventures, for example, just to tell her he loves her. We’ve all experienced similar moments, if not in real life, at least in films. Ty jsi můj malý hlupáček, she says as she ruffles his hair: you’re my little “fool”.

Regarding idiots, let’s not forget that there are those who also know well how to play the fool, but in reality are far from stupid: in Czech you would say a person like that dělá hloupého– only plays the fool, usually to gain some kind of advantage, to lie doggo Getting out of an unpleasant task at home or work, might be one example. Playing the fool, power gurus agree, can be a fairly sly means of catching others on the back foot, realising only too late they fell for a trick and as a result were badly outsmarted.