Not salty, not fatty

Hello and welcome to SoundCzech, which this week finds us dissecting a song by ageing rockers and former Czech Eurovision flag-fliers, Kabát. The song is called 'Cesta do Kadaně' ('Journey to Kadan') and sees the group travelling to a range of glamorous, and less glamorous, Czech locations and having an uproarious time in most of them. The phrase to listen out for comes bang in the middle of the song and goes 've Slaným je to nemastný':

'Ve Slaným je to nemastný' means literally 'in Slaný it isn't fatty' or 'in Slaný it isn't greasy' but, the lyric is actually a play on a Czech idiom. If you say that someone, or something, is 'neslaný, nemastný' (meaning 'not salty, not fatty' in Czech), then that thing, or that person, isn't really very much of anything. In English, an equivalent might be that they are 'neither here nor there', or that they are 'not up to much' perhaps, at a push. So, when our singer sings that 've Slaným je to nemastný' he may sound like he is extolling the health benefits of life in Slaný, but more likely, he means that the town of Slaný ain't up to much. Have another listen:

Regular listeners of SoundCzech will already be equipped with several other ways of expressing indifference towards someone or something in Czech. You can call an individual or a single object 'neslaný, nemastný'– for example, I found a Czech writing about the NHL as having a 'neslaná, nemastná sézona' ('a rather boring season') in 2009 – but if you want to compare two items alongside each other and say that they are both ‘not up to much’, then you can say in Czech that it is a case of 'jeden za osmnáct, druhý bez dvou za dvacet'. This translates literally as '18 of one and 20 minus two of the other' and is a slightly more mathematically-taxing way of saying 'six of one and half a dozen of the other', as you might in English.

Perhaps a slightly gentler way of saying 'neslaný, nemastný' (which isn't all that rude to start with, but it's good to have options) is 'ani takový, ani makový'. 'Ani takový, ani makový' means literally 'not this way, nor poppy-ish' and I think really is the Czech equivalent of 'neither here nor there'. Examples I found on the internet referred to service in a restaurant as 'ani takový, ani makový', and several unfortunate personalities were described as 'ani takový, ani makový'– in other words, 'utterly undistinguished' and 'utterly undistinguishable'.

I hope, however, that this edition of SoundCzech has proved to be far from 'ani takový, ani makový' and that you now have a range of ways to dismiss things out of hand in Czech. Until next week, though, na shledanou!