Yeah I assumed it was more of a description for a person, not a reference to the device. I'm not sure there were even alarm clocks in rural Poland at the time.

Yeah I assumed it was more of a description for a person, not a reference to the device. I'm not sure there were even alarm clocks in rural Poland at the time. IIRC a lot of words in French also work this way: simple translations today, but with more elaborate historical etymologies.