The Wall

There's a wall you hit sometimes in online research. Most of the translation research I do on the internet is pretty straightforward - checking proper names, verifying financial terms, looking up patents to harvest industry vocabulary. But if the information you need doesn't have a commercial angle or an enthusiastic fan base, soon you come to the place where the sidewalk ends.

I've had a little internet research project cooking on the back burner for a couple of years now. I want to know where the Russian word гуталин (goo-ta-LEEN, an old-fashioned word for shoe polish) comes from. Tracking down the etymologies of words borrowed into Russian in earlier generations is not the kind of hobby that will get me invited to lunch at the White House, but it satisfies a curiosity that I’m sure other translators understand.

So… I poked around in all sorts of places and found out that a material called guttaline was patented in the 1890s. The journal I found it in described it as a synthetic substitute for rubber (check it out, the recipe's a doozy). But there the trail ended, as if the inventors patented it and then forgot about it. My husband, who is both an engineer and a sympathetic listener, heard me out recently and said, "There's nothing on it because it was a dud." Why so? "Because there weren't any successful synthetic rubbers until after WWI." I looked it up. He's right. But here's an idea: if guttaline was a flop as a synthetic rubber, could it have proven to be a fair shoe polish? Accidental inventions happen all the time.

Sources on the Russian internet lean toward a German etymology because the first two syllables sound like gute, or good, in German. This feels like a false friend to me, but I can't put my finger on why. 

When you find yourself going in circles and not finding anything new in an internet search, here's a tip: try an image search. I did a search for гуталин in Yandex images and came up with a bunch of funny photos of little kids with shoe polish all over them. And then there was this:

This gives me a brand name - Альберта Закса - and some other information to check. Better yet, when you open an image in Yandex it gives you links to all the places where you can find the image online. I can't wait to find out where this new information will lead!