Where modern languages are concerned, there's not much sense in trying to hang onto meanings of words which have become outdated, historical or archaic. My aim in this column is to point out possible sources of misunderstandings when Slovaks use English words assuming that they mean the same as the similar-looking words that are used in Slovak (last week it was "personál", in July "manažer", in June "tender", in May "kauza", and so on back to "ambulancia" more than eight years ago!).

But sometimes I just feel like being pedantic when I see a very old word being used wrongly, and I think people should be more sensitive to its meaning. "Olympiad" means the period of four years which ended with a new round of Olympic Games in Ancient Greece, and it was the basis for their calculation of longer periods of time. It wasn't used to mean the Games themselves, or any kind of competition for that matter. I can't stop it being used like that today in its Slovak form, but use a different word in English!