In the English-speaking world twaróg is usually called (white) curd cheese or quark, and today often passes for a very prized and pricey health food. But as Polish quark gourmets would surely tell you, it doesn't get even close to the taste and consistency of the original Polish twaróg.
In Poland quark is a casual dish available in every grocery store. It is eaten both salty (preferably with sour cream and chives) or as sweet treat – with dżem, marmolada or powidła.
But as we're talking in this section more about words than actual things, be it even the most delicious foods, here's a little back-story behind the Polish word twaróg.
As many of you may know quark also happens to be a term from theoretical physics denoting an elementary particle – a fundamental constituent of matter. The name itself was first used around 1963 by Murray Gell-Mann, one of the two physicists who posited the quark model.
Gell-Mann later recollected that he had come across the word in one of his ‘occasional perusals’ of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. He found it in the phrase ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark’ (p. 383) and adopted it for his theory. Interestingly, he preferred to pronounce it as ‘kwork’ – for which he had his own good arguments.
The scientist believed that the phrase ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark’ might be a distorted version of ‘Three quarts for Mister Mark’, in which case the pronunciation ‘kwork’ would not be totally unjustified.
While Gell-Mann might have had his arguments for linking the origin of the Joycean phrase with the call for drinks at the bar (quark = quart), the majority of Joyce scholars are inclined to suspect an altogether different vendour's cry behind this Wake fragment.
According to this hypothesis, the vendour's cry which Joyce had likely picked up at some German market place (where he had lived at the time) it sounded more like ‘Drei Mark für muster Quark!’ which can be translated as ‘Three Marks for excellent curd cheese!’.
Quark is a German word for curd cheese, but it also just happens to be one of the very few early loan words in Old German taken from a Western Slavic language, very likely from Polish (twaróg).
The etymology of this Polish word goes back to the Proto-slavic *tvarogb, which in turn goes back to *tvoriti (= Pol. tworzyć), meaning to make, create, form.
It seems like this, after all, is not the worst etymology for a word that denotes the very basic element that forms our reality. It would also mean that the Polish language and Polish twaróg are closer to the core of English lexicon and reality itself than one would have thought.
Poland Word by Word allows foreigners to familiarise themselves with everyday Polish words by explaining their cultural context and significance. For more pronunciation tips, explore our Foreigner’s Guide to the Polish Alphabet.