Tricky Words in this week‘s OVI
Happen. If you look this up in an English-Slovak dictionary, the first meaning you find is most likely to be stať sa, prihodiť sa, which is the idea behind the nonchalant expression “..it happens". This quickly develops into “happen to somebody/something“, as in “What‘s happened to this pullover, it‘s shrunk!“ or “Has anything like this happened to you before?“ But “happen to“ is also useful for expressing the idea of náhodou, as in “I happened to meet them in Optima.“ (náhodou som ich stretol…), and the expression “As it happens, ...“ also means náhodou (not stáva sa), including the sense of contradiction in No práve (vidíš) or No náhodou (viem). There‘s not much real dialect left in English, but some people use the short form “ ‘appen" (‘Appen I did!) in the sense of predsa.
