The world inside-out

Welcome to SoundCzech. Do you ever get the feeling that the world has gone mad, that everything is upside-down? The songwriters Voskovec and Werich had the same feeling when they wrote the following ditty more than 70 years ago, but in Czech they called it “Svět naruby”, or “the world inside-out”.

“Leave it to the astronomers to tell me whether I’m dreaming or awake, when I see the world upside-down”, or inside-out in Czech. So if you think the world has gone topsy-turvy, you can take some comfort in the fact that it was topsy-turvy 70 years ago as well – certainly even more so in fact; the usually comic Werich is singing about “chewing slogans instead of bread” in a bitter testament to the age he was singing in.

Naturally, it’s not usually the world that’s referred to as naruby, luckily, but your shirt. You can also say the world’s gone mad by saying svět je vzhůru nohama, it’s upside-down, or literally, “feet up”, or you can see it or any other mad situation as being postavený na hlavu, standing on its head; some things to think of when you look around at the things that boggle the mind or zůstává rozum stát, things that “leave your reason standing”.