Growing up, my dad would point at any boat he saw and said “Yadja boat!” As we grew older, it finally occurred to us to ask what that meant, and he said that “Yadja” meant “there goes”, so we all had a good laugh that he was just saying “there goes the boat” for years.

Time passes and the Internet becomes commonplace. I cannot get a translation of “there goes” that looks anything like “Yadja” even accounting for not really speaking the language. Asking Dad, he doesn’t know how it is spelled and, being born and raised in America, doesn’t really speak/read Polish.

So, my questions: is there a word in Polish that sounds kinda like “yadja”? Does it mean “there goes”? Is it some sort of slang or is it completely made up by dear old dad?

Edit: thanks, all, jedzie it is! It might not be the word that he should have used, but at least we have the answer to what he was trying to say, lol.

  • agavaa@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Yeah, the word is “jedzie”, aka “there goes”. A native speaker wouldn’t use this word about a boat though, it would be “płynie”, which literally means “there swims”; we just use a different word for watercrafts.

    • brachypelmasmithi@lemm.ee
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      18 hours ago

      As a native speaker I use jedzie in the context of boats embarassingly often. It doesn’t really make a difference in casual settings since you get the message across anyway, but of course you wouldn’t say that in any formal situation.