Między potocznością a erudycyjnością. Uwagi o języku Tadeusza Boya-Żeleńskiego

This paper is an attempt to discuss certain aspects of Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński’s style. It notes the coexistence of in fact mutually exclusive lexical phenomena in the artist’s texts, i.e. popular, colloquial, bawdy, and vulgar names (e.g. bufon, safanduła, pierdoła, pryk, bajdurzyć, mizdrzyć się, rżnąć marsze, zalać pałę) and vocabulary attributable to the sphere of erudition, that is vocabulary the primary feature of which is that it is present today, but it was also present at the turn of the 20th century and in the interwar period in the written variant of Polish or in carefully worded utterances (e.g.: epikurejczyk, erudyta, diatryb, eufemizm, mimetyzm, preegzystencja, trawestacja, sardoniczny, deliberować, restytuować). It also points to the fact that expressions that are diverse in terms of emotional and stylistic markedness function in Boy-Żeleński’s works naturally and virtually unpretentiously.