Kanar. The story of a word that began with a yellow band on a cap

Chłodna Street, 1932. In Henryk Poddębski’s photograph a number 5 tram is making its way down the street. What the picture does not show: inside, a conductor with a bag over his shoulder and a ticket punch in his hand, and sometimes a second man in uniform who sells no tickets at all. He only looks at them. On his cap, just above the peak, runs a narrow band in a colour you can spot from the far end of the carriage. Canary yellow. Someone mutters a single word under their breath, and that word will outlive the tram, the conductor and the cap.

The word is kanar, Polish slang for a ticket inspector. The PWN dictionary labels it derogatory. On the tram it can be affectionate too, and it is understood from one end of Poland to the other. Where did the yellow come from, what does a nineteenth-century omnibus have to do with it, and why does a Russian ride without a ticket as a hare, while a German rides in the black?

IA yellow band on a cap

The simplest explanation is also the best documented. Asked about it by the PWN Language Advisory Service (Poradnia Językowa PWN) in 2005, Professor Mirosław Bańko gave a short answer: the name came ‘from the canary colour of the bands on the caps of inspectors in days gone by’. The National Centre for Culture says the same in its series ‘Ojczysty. Dodaj do ulubionych’ (‘Mother Tongue. Add to Favourites’): pre-war inspectors wore caps with a yellow band, passengers called them kanarki, little canaries, and in time the diminutive was roughened into the blunter kanar.

A cap band, or otok, is the strip of cloth that runs round a cap just above the peak. In the uniforms of the interwar years, the colour of the band told you who its wearer was. A passenger in a packed carriage did not read badges or identity cards. He saw a yellow band and knew that any moment now he would hear ‘Bilety do kontroli’: tickets, please.

All the inspector kept of the bird was its colour. A canary dress, a canary car: in Polish, the canary has long stood for bright yellow. The name of the colour passed to a strip of cloth, and from the strip to a person. Linguists call this metonymy.

The PWN Dictionary of the Polish Language has two separate entries: kanar as a plant, canary grass, whose seed is scattered for birds, and kanar as ‘derog. a ticket inspector on urban public transport’. Next to them stand kanarek (dismissive) and kanarzyca (of a female inspector). The bird itself takes its name from the Canary Islands, from where it was brought to Europe.

IIBefore the inspectors came, there was a yellow omnibus

The word has an older, Warsaw layer too. In his ‘Słownik gwary warszawskiej XIX wieku’ (‘Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Warsaw Dialect’, 1966), Bronisław Wieczorkiewicz recorded that kanarek was also the city’s name for ‘the old municipal omnibus running from St Alexander’s Square to Krasiński Square, painted yellow’. St Alexander’s Square is today’s Three Crosses Square (plac Trzech Krzyży). So the yellow coach rolled along Nowy Świat and Krakowskie Przedmieście, and Varsovians gave it the very name they would give the inspectors several decades later. The same dictionary, Bańko adds, also lists kanarek as a telegraphist, and the example makes it clear that, once again, it was all about the colour of the uniform.

Horse-drawn omnibuses were Warsaw’s first public transport. Transport historians date the earliest to the 1820s, and the first regular city route to 1844, when the ‘sztajnkellerka’, named after the industrialist Piotr Steinkeller, began running between the Mostowski Palace and Vienna Station (Dworzec Wiedeński). In 1881 the city had seven omnibus routes; the busiest linked Krasiński Square with St Alexander’s Square. That is the route of Wieczorkiewicz’s kanarek.

The colour had a job to do. More than half the city’s inhabitants could not read, so vehicles were told apart by their colours. When a Belgian company built up a network of horse-drawn trams in Warsaw in 1883, its eleven lines were given not numbers but colours.

IIICanaries in uniform: the military police

Between the wars the word had yet another life, a long way from the tram. The Dictionary of the Polish Language edited by Witold Doroszewski, Bańko reminds us, records that before the Second World War soldiers of the military police, the żandarmeria, were called kanarki. The reason was the same: the colour of the band on their caps, a lemon yellow.

So kanar came from several places at once: from the yellow omnibus that ran through Warsaw before anyone checked tickets, from the cap bands of the military police and from the cap bands of the inspectors. No one has established when the word first appeared in print meaning an inspector. The dictionaries and advisory services agree on the pre-war period; from the nineteenth century, only the omnibus is attested.

IVThe conductor, the inspector and the bag of tickets

Before the kanar there was the conductor. For a hundred years every carriage carried a man who sold tickets, opened and closed the doors, gave the signal to depart and kept order. Together with the driver he made up a ‘brigade’. The Tramwaje Warszawskie blog describes his morning: from the duty clerk he collected a bag with a counted number of tickets of every kind, his service card and his number. In the bag was a cover for his ticket waybill, listing the lines, important telephone numbers and a tariff of charges for damage, plus 5 złoty put aside the day before for giving change. The punches used to clip tickets had tips of different shapes: little stars, little crosses, ovals. From the hole in a ticket you could tell who had punched it.

The conductor wore a uniform from the very start. The 1866 regulations of the ‘horse-drawn iron road’ required him to dress ‘in the prescribed form’ and to treat passengers ‘politely and obligingly’. The inspector was to the conductor what an auditor is to a cashier. He checked the passengers, but he also checked that the conductor was not selling the same tickets twice. Post-war records of Gdańsk’s public transport, described by the gdansk.pl portal, are full of reports from ‘flying inspectors’ who jumped onto moving trams and opened their reports with the word ‘donoszę’, ‘I hereby report’. The commonest charge: ‘ticket embezzlement’, meaning reselling tickets, turning a blind eye to fare dodging, or failing to enter sales on the waybill.

Then came the occupation. Tickets grew dearer (5 groszy in autumn 1939, 20 groszy in 1940, 40 groszy from May 1942), and passengers paid the conductor en masse without taking a ticket; the tickets went back into the bag and were sold a second time. In those years the conductor was on the passenger’s side: he warned of round-ups and smuggled underground newspapers. In 1942 the Germans arrested 250 Warsaw conductors and deported them to Treblinka, and sacked 450 more. German inspectors rode along Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) in a ‘phantom car’ marked ‘Sonderwagen’. On 26 April 1944 the Home Army’s ‘Zośka’ battalion carried out an operation against its crew.

Conductors did not vanish from the carriages until the 1960s. The Tramwaje Warszawskie timeline gives two dates: on 1 January 1964 the fitting of ticket validators began, and on 19 May 1965 ‘conductorless operation’ was introduced. At first a conductor stayed on only in the rear car of a set, while in the front car passengers punched their own tickets. The validator was invented by a Pole, Józef Baranowski. In Gdańsk conductors were phased out gradually until 1972, and on some buses they held on into the second half of the 1970s. Gdańsk’s validators were known as ‘Krak’, its ticket machines as ‘Krab’.

This is where the kanar’s real career begins. As long as a conductor rode in the carriage, a passenger without a ticket had nowhere to hide. Once the conductor had been replaced by a validator, the only person left who could demand to see a ticket was the inspector. From an occasional auditor he became part of the daily ride. It is fair to assume that this was when a word known in pre-war Warsaw spread across the whole of Poland.

VNa gapę, in the black, as a hare

In Polish you ride na gapę. Where the phrase comes from is not entirely clear. A gapa is someone who gawps instead of paying attention; in old dialects the word also meant a crow or a rook. So na gapę would mean something like gawper-fashion, as if you simply hadn’t noticed you were supposed to pay. Dictionaries of idioms record the phrase as widespread in the twentieth century, but do not pin down its first use.

In German such a passenger is a ‘Schwarzfahrer’, and the act itself is ‘schwarzfahren’, riding in the black. In German, ‘schwarz’ stands for what is illegal: the black market, work done off the books. Some linguists, however, trace the word back to Yiddish, to ‘shvarts’ in the sense of poverty, and the argument goes on. In July 2021 transport operators in Vienna, Berlin and Munich, along with Austrian Railways, announced that they were dropping it from their announcements in favour of ‘passenger without a valid ticket’, because it is too easily associated with skin colour. ‘Schwarzfahrer’ is also the title of an Oscar-winning short film by Pepe Danquart from 1993: a Black passenger on a Munich tram sits through a tirade from an elderly woman, and when the inspector gets on, he eats her ticket. The one left riding without a ticket is the one who did the shouting.

In Russian a fare dodger is a ‘zayats’, a hare. People have spoken of ‘riding as a hare’ since the nineteenth century; the usual explanation is that a ticketless passenger trembles like a hare and bolts at the sight of an inspector. In Czech the inspector is a ‘revizor’, and a ticketless passenger a ‘černý pasažér’, a black passenger, just as in German. In French, a ‘resquilleur’, from a verb for slipping in without paying. In English it is colourless: ‘fare dodger’, someone who dodges the fare. In Italian, ‘fare il portoghese’, to play the Portuguese, from an anecdote about eighteenth-century Rome, where the Portuguese embassy invited its countrymen to a free performance and half the city suddenly turned out to be Portuguese. In Hungarian, ‘bliccelni’. The Hungarians also have the most famous film about inspectors: Nimród Antal’s ‘Kontroll’ from 2003, a black comedy about a crew of ticket inspectors on the Budapest metro.

Most of these words describe the passenger. The Polish kanar describes the man in the cap.

VIKanar in culture, in court and in a suit

Is kanar an insult? In 2009 Professor Bańko looked it up in four dictionaries: two labelled the word derogatory, one ironic, and one passed no judgement at all. His verdict: the word expresses dislike and ‘is hurtful to the person so named’, which makes it impolite, even offensive. He also pointed out that the courts punish the public insulting of an official on duty, and that judges sometimes reach for a dictionary to justify a verdict. The professor knew of no actual conviction ‘for kanar’. Safer, then, to use the word about inspectors among yourselves rather than to their faces.

The word turns up in Polish courses for foreigners, in the sentence ‘Złapał mnie kanar’, ‘a kanar caught me’. It is a tag on forums and social media, where passengers have for years been swapping tips on where and when the inspectors get on. Younger people have given it a jokey, mock-Greek version: ‘kanarinios’. Inspectors themselves, in private, call themselves kanary, just as police officers call themselves gliny, coppers.

The yellow band disappeared along with the pre-war uniforms. For decades the inspector was a man in plain clothes with an identity card in his hand, and you never knew which of the passengers he was. Since 1 November 2017, inspectors working for Warsaw’s Public Transport Authority (Zarząd Transportu Miejskiego, ZTM) have worn a standard outfit: graphite trousers and jacket, a white shirt, black shoes, a tie for men and a neck scarf for women. Only traffic supervisors were given caps with a band, and a red one at that. Ticket inspections and penalty fares are governed by Article 33a of the Transport Law (Prawo przewozowe) of 1984; an inspector is required to show an identity badge.

VIIWhy the app carries the word in its name

Gdzie Jest Kanar (literally ‘Where’s the kanar?’) is named the way passengers talk, not the way the regulations do. For a hundred years the word belonged to the people in the carriage: to those who whispered it at the sight of a yellow cap band, and to those who, after 1965, punched their own tickets and answered for themselves if they had none. There is irony in it, and a little of the same urban affection with which Varsovians named the yellow omnibus the little canary, and the horse-drawn trams toads.

The app, though, is on the side of the ticket. Like the yellow band in an old photograph, the kanar in the name is a reminder that the ride has rules and that someone is there to enforce them. Knowing where the kanar is: an old passenger skill. Having a validated ticket: an older one, and cheaper.

Bibliography

• Poradnia Językowa PWN (PWN Language Advisory Service), Prof. Mirosław Bańko, entry ‘kanar’ (etymology), 27.02.2005
• Poradnia Językowa PWN (PWN Language Advisory Service), Prof. Mirosław Bańko, entry ‘kanar’ (usage), 22.09.2009
• Słownik języka polskiego PWN (PWN Dictionary of the Polish Language), entries ‘kanar’ and ‘kanarek’
• Narodowe Centrum Kultury (National Centre for Culture), ‘Ojczysty. Dodaj do ulubionych’, language snippet KANAR
• Bronisław Wieczorkiewicz, ‘Słownik gwary warszawskiej XIX wieku’ (Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Warsaw Dialect), PWN, Warszawa 1966 (as cited by Poradnia PWN)
• Blog Tramwajów Warszawskich (Warsaw Trams blog), ‘Konduktorzy i konduktorki’ (Conductors, men and women)
• Tramwaje Warszawskie, ‘Historia warszawskich tramwajów’ (History of Warsaw’s trams, timeline)
• Aleksandra Polańska, ‘Tramwaj konny w Warszawie’ (The horse tram in Warsaw), Muzeum Warszawy (PDF)
• Muzeum Warszawy, ‘Pieszo, tramwajem, rikszą, czyli komunikacja w Warszawie w czasie okupacji’ (On foot, by tram, by rickshaw: getting around Warsaw under the occupation)
• dzieje.pl (PAP), ‘150 lat temu w Warszawie ruszył tramwaj konny’ (150 years ago the horse tram started running in Warsaw)
• gdansk.pl, ‘Byli kiedyś konduktorzy’ (Once there were conductors)
• NaKolei.pl, ‘Stroje pracowników ZTM w Warszawie: od 1 listopada kontrolera biletów poznamy po mundurku’ (ZTM staff uniforms in Warsaw: from 1 November you will know a ticket inspector by the uniform), 2017
• The Local, ‘No more Schwarzfahren: Austrian and German cities to phase out term’, 9.07.2021
• Ustawa z 15 listopada 1984 r. Prawo przewozowe (Transport Law Act of 15 November 1984, Article 33a on ticket inspections), ISAP
• Omnibusy konne w Warszawie 1822 do 1941 (Horse-drawn omnibuses in Warsaw, 1822 to 1941; hobbyist compilation, to be verified)