This article researches the debatable issue in semasiology, particularly the origin of an idiom captured in four Slavic languages: Ukrainian zbyty z pantelyku, Russian sbit’ s pantalyku, Belarusian zbits’ z pantalyku, Polish zbić z pantałyku. The subject of analysis is fictional texts and lexicographical sources in which this phraseological unit first appeared. All etymological hypotheses developed by language experts during 19th-20th centuries were dedicated to the explanation of the word «pantelyk». The difficulty of revealing the figurative basis of the expression is due to the fact that this keyword does not belong to the Slavic vocabulary. This circumstance made it complicated to explain how the term «pantelyk» influenced the original figurative meaning of the idiom «seduce out of the right way». The new etymological version, offered by the article’s author, is that the idiom zbyty z pantelyku can be reconstructed as a semantic chain: throw off a course → seduce out of the right way → to throw into confusion → zbyty z pantelyku. The word «pantelyk», which wasn’t a part of any dialect, is a nonce formation or an occasional expression that emerged as a result of a burlesque travesty genre in the poem Eneyida by Ivan Kotlyarevsky.
Questioning in class is often found by students to be highly stressful and a cause of anxiety. Lower-order questions, in particular, are often closely linked to behaviour management, with teachers using them as a means of control in the classroom while e.g. manipulating or accusing. The fact that questions are mainly initiated by teachers ( they ask up to two questions every minute and questioning may account for even up to a third of all teaching time) and that there exists a strong asymmetric relationship in their number (students, on average ask not more than 6 questions during one lesson) may have a tremendous impact on students’ emotional well-being and their learning. This asymmetric relationship stems from differences of status, roles, age, education or class and can give teachers power or authority. Questions are commonly used as part of a power struggle, and pupils can still fi nd this sort of interrogation intimidating. Thus teacher’s questioning (Mitchell cited in Hastings 2003) has been found children’s main source of fear and face-threatening act – the learners are not afraid of being wrong, but of looking silly – saying something that will be ridiculed by the teacher or other pupils. It is well known that FTAs threatening the hearer’s self-image include expressions negatively evaluating the hearer’s positive face, e.g. disapproval, accusations, disagreement or criticism and all of these elements are commonly appearing in teacher’s discourse and questions they ask. Those of the lower status and less dominant role (students) use more indirectness and more negative politeness features, such as hedges and mitigation, than those with the higher status (teachers) do (Cutting 2002). The article also aims at presenting Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive learning (1956) and the influence the language of teacher’s questions may have on students experiencing face-threatening acts.