I rarely feel like writing about words and etymology, but this is one of those times.
Anyone who has studied Czech remembers that one fine day when they had to retrain and force themselves to stop using a word as incomprehensible as “hobby” and start using the obvious “koníček.”
Years go by, and you sit there wondering, “What does that horse have to do with anything?” But eventually, you stop thinking about it and forget.
But more years pass, and someone throws the word “konek” into a conversation in Russian to mean “hobby,” and you’re like, “Huh?”
You start googling and it turns out that Czech—as always—is the most correct and ancient Indo-European language.
The word “hobby,” it turns out, comes from a breed of horses in English. Like, you used to ride them, kick their asses. And that’s the ironic “kicking dicks” (or the more civilized “killing time”) (note: "kicking dicks" is a Russian way to say "to be doing nothing meaningful"), which is essentially a direct calque from the English “hobby-horsing.” Like, that activity that doesn’t really serve any purpose—riding a horse.
Then comes the abbreviation, and “horsing” gets dropped. Then other languages come along, and following the good old tradition, they translate it directly (because that’s what the smart people back then did—it was a status symbol). And just like that, it went into production—and “koníček” was born in Russian.
That’s how “koníček” came to be in Czech. And that’s how “dada” came to be in French dada, and of course, not a single French person has any idea where “dada” came from or what horses have to do with it (just like not a single Russian or Czech person does).
I wonder, if idleness had appeared a little later, in our time, what would we have called it—YouTube-ing, TikTok-ing, or something even more mindless, like creating AI agents?