In the region where I was growing up next to Poland, we say "chodit do roboty" when describing normal work.

A lot of Czech people use this phrase in a very subtle, almost undetectable jest, but it is still fundamentally in jest. Drawing a connection between having to work for a living and likening it to being forced to work. It's similar to saying "Back to the salt mines" meaning back to work.

I don't doubt that, you're probably from somewhere around Ostrava. There are of course regional differences. I'm from Brno and instead of "jít do práce" we usually used "jít do hokny", "jít do háčku", or just "jít makat". Whenever I hear word "robota", I connect it with my grand-grand-...-father who was forced to work ("robota") by "dráb" (overseer) and didn't like it. So he cut overseer's head with his scythe, became a village hero and founded a church there.

So I'm hard-wired to dislike "robota".

I did not expect to read hantec on HN today. Enough internet and about time for a škopek I guess.

> So he cut overseer's head with his scythe, became a village hero and founded a church there

do go on, sounds like quite a story in there.

Reminds of the Russian "chodit na rabotu".

It cannot be helped if your práce feels much like robota. Which, granted, happens a lot.

Interesting that in Ukrainian робота and праця are synonymous. Although, some derived words are different in meaning. Like робітник is a worker but працівник is an employee. I see in another comment that the same is true in Polish.

It is similar in Polish. “Robota” as a colloquialism is used to denote tedious, unpleasant, and labor-intensive labor (literally manual labor), and it has a coarse connotation, so it is often used in jest (“wracać do roboty” is something like “back to the salt mines”).

The typical and more genteel way to refer to work is “praca”. “Szukam pracę” is how you would typically say “I’m looking for work”, for example [0]; “ciężko pracuję” means “I work hard”. So while “robotnik” is better understood as specifically a manual laborer or someone of the working class, “pracownik” means something like “employee”.

[0] I am aware of the Czech false cognate “šukat” :).