Final Word from Wednesday, December 17, 2025
A study should perhaps be conducted of the correlation between the progressive intonation of politicians and the slant of their politics. Progressive intonation, as we wrote in Oct. 2023, is one that rises at the end of a declarative sentence and often glides into the next sentence. As PM, Petr Fiala led the most-progressive Czech government ever and was creating a sort of Euro society, similar to the Euro beer that many Czechs complained about, but his intonation wasn't ever particularly progressive. Andrej Babiš, in contrast, is promising to maintain the Czech identity, but his intonation in his "intergovernmental" period from Dec. 17, 2021, to Dec. 15, 2025, grew noticeably more uptalky. Fiala retained this small part of his conservativeness, despite being surrounded by the progressives of Spolu and PirStan. Whether the conservatives of SPD and the Motorists are having any effect on this aspect of the semi-progressiveness of Babiš is something we'll now get an indication of in the news almost every night. [ Czech Republic inflection Moto ANO ODS Pirates STAN ]
Glossary of difficult words
correlation - a mutual relationship or connection between two or more things;
slant - a particular point of view from which something is seen or presented;
declarative sentence - a sentence that makes a statement;
intergovernmental - between two governments;
uptalk - a manner of speaking in which declarative sentences are uttered with rising intonation at the end, as if they were questions.