Some words gradually disappear from everyday speech. This can happen for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes the generation for whom those words were ordinary and natural passes away, and younger people simply do not pick them up. Or prolonged russification can affect the language, gradually leading us to abandon some of our own words. At other times, social or historical factors may be at work. So it is not always possible to point to a single reason why a word stopped being heard. But if it still survives in people’s memories or in dictionaries, we can try to catch it and bring it back into the language.
In the fourth episode of the podcast “The Rheme Catcher,” Zhenya and Uladzik (Uladzislau Harbacki – a sociolinguist and gender studies scholar) set off down the trail of half-forgotten words. This time, they catch one. For Uladzislau, the word had remained a personal mystery for many years, and the search for its meaning turned into a real linguistic detective story.
Uladzislau had often heard his grandmother use the word kilchyba. From the context, he could of course tell that it referred to something bad, but he did not know exactly what the word meant.
One conversation between his grandmother and a doctor stuck with him in particular. When the doctor asked his grandmother what she could prescribe for her, she replied, “Just prescribe me some kind of kilchyba.”
The doctor did not understand the word. Perhaps she thought, “The old lady isn’t speaking clearly, or she’s simply making something up.” Later, his grandmother passed away, but kilchyba remained a mystery to Uladzislau. For years, he was convinced it was a word used only in the Vitebsk region. That seemed all the more likely because even his fellow linguists could not explain it. The answer came much later – in the archives.
While working with a dictionary compiled by linguist Yazep Tsikhinski, Uladzislau finally came across the familiar word. Tsikhinski spent several decades compiling a large Belarusian-russian-Polish dictionary with definitions. Correspondents from different parts of Belarus helped him by sending in local words and expressions. The dictionary was never published and is preserved in Vilnius. It helped establish one important fact: in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, kilchyba was not confined to the Vitebsk region – it was known much more widely. Now it has simply disappeared.
And at last it became clear what his grandmother had meant. Kilchyba had several meanings, all of them related in one way or another to poison.
According to one definition, it was a poisonous plant similar to herb Paris. In folk tales and legends, it was sometimes associated with witches, who were said to use it.
But there was another meaning as well. Kilchyba could also refer to poison, including strychnine. It was in this broader sense that Uladzislau’s grandmother used the word. She once explained that kilchyba was used to poison mice or rats. And when his grandmother asked the doctor to prescribe her “at least some kilchyba,” she was joking. Everything hurt, and she felt terrible. It was her way of emphasizing just how bad she felt. “So it’s a good thing the doctor didn’t know the word and didn’t prescribe any kilchyba,” Uladzislau adds with a touch of humor.
Kilchyba is unlikely to become a word we use every day. But that does not mean it should remain forgotten. Especially since bringing old words back does not mean they have to replace the ones we use now. They can exist alongside them as synonyms.
For Uladzislau, kilchyba has a personal significance. It is a genuine Belarusian word that was known in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it also reminds him of Vitebsk and his grandmother. And when he finally found the explanation, Uladzislau said, “It felt as though my grandmother were speaking to me again.”
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