Layoff for "sloppy language"

Zuzana Kocumová, a Czech cross-country skier who competed in several international contests, has been banned as a commentator at the Nordic World Ski Championship in Liberec for refusing to attach the suffix "-ova" to names of foreign female athletes, as is customary in the Czech language. The conservative daily Lidové noviny comments: "We can praise our language for its flexibility and we assiduously lengthen and decline names, but that doesn't help us at all on the Internet, on Google for example, because there there's no '-ova' suffix. De facto we already use two languages (one day-to-day, another in the Internet). The purism being propagated so passionately here is simply funny to watch. ... The purists may not like it, but all Kocumová did was to reflect this reality. In ten years we'll no doubt laugh over this struggle against putatively sloppy language."

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