Zasadzk
Modern Polish folk wisdom #143
A Triangle-person is standing at the foot of an arrow going away into the distance.
Arrows branch off it, making the main arrow smaller and smaller. On the left they branch off towards: a monster with an axe, a toothy snake, poison. On the right: a large hole, a sharp pendulum that can slice you, and a spiked wooden mat.
At the head of the main arrow (now very small) is a bed and a sign proclaiming: “Tomorrow”.
The folk wisdom is printed below: “Life is brutal and full of zasadzkas*”
Zasadzkas is explained as “* traps”.
This saying has apparently been coined in the 1982 movie “Karate po polsku” (“Karate the Polish way”), but it became popular a few decades ago. It’s a humorous way of saying “stuff happens”, or sometimes “deal with it.”
“Zasadzka” translates as a “trap”, but can also mean an “ambush”. The humour comes not only from dropping a Polish word into an English sentence, but also from forcing it into the English plural (ending with -s). In Polish we don’t say “zasadzkas”, we say “zasadzek”.