О шерифах и ментах

Наконец-то решила заняться шерифом. Почему? Потому, что меня часто спрашивают, чем этот шериф отличается от state trooper или police. Попробую ответить коротко.

Шериф появился раньше всех в истории правоохранительных структур в Америке. Власти в Англии назначали шерифов, чтобы следить за порядком и собирать налоги в колониях. После революции, должность шерифа продолжала существовать без особых изменений. В случае надобности, шериф мог призывать местных жителей на облаву преступника, но шерифские будни протекали иначе - содержанием тюрьмы, организацией выборов и собиранием налогов. Такая общая административная работа.

State troopers и police - структуры более современные. Бостон создал первый городской police department в 1838 г. State troopers (они же и Highway Patrol) появились уже в 20-м веке. Должностные инструкции у них бывают разные, в зависимости от штата, но как правило state troopers занимаются движением на трассах и личной безопасностью губернатора, а police просто ловят преступников в черте своего города.

В больших городах, старый шериф теперь всего лишь доставляет подозреваемых из jail в courthouse и обратно. В глухих местах, шериф и его помощники патрулируют за чертой городков и населенных пунктов.

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Losing My Mind

I spent a good three minutes looking at a completely new word the other day. It was at the end of a marketing text, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it meant. Ретвитните (retvitnitye). The root was a mysterious "tvit." The prefix means to do the "tvit" again. The suffix means that it's an imperative.

And then it dawned on me - "tvit" means "tweet!" The text is asking you to retweet an announcement (on Twitter). A Yandex search turned up lots of ретвитните, плз (retvitnite, plz), which means "retweet this, please."

Winchester

What's a Winchester?

If you're from Texas, you'll think of a rifle. If you're from Russia, you'll think of a computer hard drive. I live in both places and it never occurred to me to wonder if the two were somehow connected.

The story I recently heard in Russia is that the same Winchester rifle folks also made hard drives back in the day. Stranger things have happened, but this particular business diversification never took place. A wee bit of fact checking revealed that the Winchester hard drive was actually released by IBM in the 70s and got its nickname because it was intended to have two 30 MB spindles, which reminded someone on the project of the Winchester 30-30 rifle.

In Russian, винчестер (vinchester) is a generic term for any hard drive and is often cut back to винт (vint), which happens to be the word for "screw" (as in the screw that propels a submarine).

Моветон

Looking for French words hiding in Russian is like popping sunflower seeds - once you start you can't stop!

Моветон - from the French "mauvais ton," or "bad taste."

I came across an interesting use of the word in the Jan. 25 issue of Dengi. The context is a discussion of the changing role of in-house security employees at Russian companies, specifically the fact that they are less likely to kidnap people now than they once were:

"Подобные ситуации были широко распространены в "лихие девяностые", когда милиция практически не работала по защите "проклятых буржуев". В настоящее время это уже моветон. Но главное не в приличиях, а в неэффективности и рискованности таких действий."

My translation:

"Things like that [kidnappings] were a common occurrence in the wild 90s because the police were basically refusing to protect 'bourgeois pigs.' That would be mauvais ton today. And it's not really a question of manners. It's just ineffective and risky."

I thought it was interesting that the interviewee used the term "mauvais ton" and immediately followed it with the qualification that he isn't talking about manners. He seems to be using моветон to mean "stupid."

When I turned to the Russian National Corpus and searched for моветон, I found this whimsical line from a play by Maxim Gorky:

Не гризе па ле семиачки, се моветон.

Don't munch on les sunflower seeds, c'est mauvais ton.

Сиринет

A few days ago I ran into a completely unfamiliar word - сиринет (sirinet). From the context it seemed like a musical instrument of some sort. A Yandex search yielded little aside from a mirror of the text I was already translating (love the Russian internet). Google searches for sirinette, syrinette and cyrinette, with or without the additional term "music," were fruitless as well.

When I inquired, the client replied that a сиринет was a phonograph traditionally used to provide music in a pub-style restaurant.

That solved the immediate problem of how to translate the term: in the very non-technical context the word "phonograph" would do nicely. But I am interested in music history, and a music term that comes up with no relevant hits in Google is enough of a mystery to keep me awake at night.

Sleep works wonders.

The next day it dawned on me that the сирин- part of the word could be a phonetic spelling in Cyrillic of a word that used different vowels in its original language. I might be looking at a word that had a connection to sirens, either the Greek ones or the emergency ones.

Bullseye! The Pulsometer Sirenette was a ship's fog horn. Here are some pictures of Sirenettes (third row down) - they look a little like the amplification horn on a phonograph, don't they?[03.2010 NOTE: the picture gallery is moving hosts - I will revise the link once it is up again]

If anyone knows how pub phonographs came to be called Sirenettes in Russian (and whether or not the name was ever in widespread use) I'd love to hear about it.

Грызть

Грызть (gryzt) - to chew or gnaw. From here we get the word for rodent, грызун (gryzun).

The other day it occurred to me to wonder whether or not the Russian word had any connection with the English word grist. Remember the old cliché "grist for the mill?" I turned to the OED and found out that grist is the name for grain to be ground at a mill. It can also refer to the act of grinding. The OED also cited an example from the 15th century where grist means to gnash one's teeth in anger.

So the two words don't just sound alike - they're related! Fascinating!

Gogol-Mogol and the "M" Trick

Some people like to have a гоголь-моголь (GO-gol MO-gol, a raw egg beaten with sugar) for breakfast, some people don't. I stay away from raw eggs but I'm very interested in the name of the drink. Repeating a word with an "m" instead of the first consonant is a funny little habit that you hear a lot when you talk with people from the Caucasus region. Think шашлык-машлык (barbecue-marbecue) or чай-май (tea-mea). It doesn't seem to mean anything in particular when people do the "m" trick; it just injects a feeling of relaxation into the conversation.

I usually hear Armenians do the чай-май thing on food words, but the other day a Russian relative who grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia was over for tea and he did the "m" trick on a word that had nothing to do with food. He was talking about construction materials and I sat up straight in my seat when he did it. I was too shy to pull out my notebook and write it down at the moment and now, of course, I've forgotten it - a fitting punishment.

Mamalyga

At lunch today I put cornbread on the table. My father-in-law put on his glasses and exclaimed "It's mamalyga! Where did you find it?"

I told him it was from Trader Joe's.

Mamalyga is polenta. I believe the name mamalyga is used in lots of places from Hungary to Georgia. Here's a very appetizing picture of people eating mamalyga with delicious condiments in Abkhazia. Apparently the name comes from "melega," an old Italian word for corn (or sorghum, depending on where you look).

POSBON, the whole story

I did find out what the name of the funeral home ПОСБОН stands for: Производственное объединение специализированного бытового обслуживания населения

Here comes the full translation: Production Group for Specialized Life Services for the Public

Life Services?

Быт (life) is a strange word in Russian. It means everyday life, as in slogging through. Small towns still tend to have a Дом Быта, a building full of small businesses that cater to those annoying tasks every human faces: taking your clothes to get dry-cleaned, buying a new extension cord, getting your picture taken for a passport application, buying the specific, hard-to-find brand of cat food your vet recommends, getting the sole glued back on your shoe, etc.

Now that I re-read the above paragraph, I think I prefer the funeral homes that advertise as Ритуальные Услуги (ritual services).

Память на века

"Погребение в мавзолее-усыпальнице: скидка - 5% с предъявлением этого купона"

"Mausoleum burial: 5% off with this coupon"

This ad made me put down my fork. I'll let other people wonder about how the deceased are supposed to present coupons, or better yet, pay $26/month for a double. Here's my take on the words:

Мавзолей (mav-zo-LAY) is an obvious borrowing of the word mausoleum. The root of усыпальница (oo-si-PAL-neet-sa) is the Russian word for sleep, and the prefix means "away." It's another word for mausoleum. I'm not sure why the two are used together so often. Perhaps the pair functions as a euphemism. I've always been partial to the word склеп (sklep, or tomb). Makes me think of the mask of Agamemnon. Click the link to see a map of what sklep means in different Slavic languages.

In the same vein, I've wondered for years about ПОСБОН (POSBON), the name of a chain of funeral homes in the area where we live near Moscow. I tried to make it be an abbreviation of funeral home - похоронное бюро - but it just doesn't work. What are the "s" and the "n" doing there? I guess I could call them and ask.

I promise the next entry will be about lovely food and food words.

Лапша

Now that he's in school, my son's Russian is getting better every day. The other day I heard him say, "Не вешай мне макароны на уши!" ("Don't hang macaroni on my ears!") The actual Russian expression is "лапшу вешать на уши," or hanging noodles (lapsha) on someone's ears, and it means "to tell a lie." I suppose he heard the expression at school and didn't know the word лапша so he substituted Italian macaroni for Russian noodles. Curiously, Russians use the word macaroni for any pasta product, not just elbow macaroni. The word lapsha is reserved for homemade noodles.

According to Vasmer, лапша was borrowed from Tatar laksha, meaning little pieces of dough cooked in a stock.

On Possums

В детстве мне казалось, что название нашей улицы обусловлено самой природой - в любой день здесь можно встретить по крайней мере три-четыре раздавленных опоссумов. Позже я узнала, что официально улица называется FM 1374 ("farm to market"). Но народное название очень стойкое, чему свидетельствует этот краеведческий знак.

Слово "опоссум" происходит от алгонкин opassom ("белая собака" на языке племени индейцев), позже стали пропускать букву о- в начале слова. To play possum означает притворяться мертвым.

Каково было мое удивление, когда я открыла новый номер "Вог-Вязание" и увидела дорогие нитки из шерсти опоссума.

Redneck Putdown

Back in August I read about a wonderful British expression for taking down an over-confident blow-hard, "all mouth and no trousers." Today I ran into that expression's country cousin, "all hat and no cattle." I saw the phrase in an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle, but I can't tell you if it's a genuine Texas saying because I've never heard it before.

There's a roach!

I've got roaches on my mind today for all the wrong reasons.

Did you know that, in addition to the word таракан (ta-ra-KAN), Russian has another word for roach? It's прусак (pru-SACK). Think back to Chukovsky's Fedorino Gore, where she is making big concessions if only her dishes will agree to come back to her:

Я почищу вас песочком,

Окачу вас кипяточком,

И вы будете опять,

Словно солнышко, сиять,

А поганых тараканов я повыведу,

Прусаков и пауков я повымету

These прусаки are small roaches, and apparently they got their name because Russians thought they came from Prussia. In America, small roaches are called German cockroaches. Supposedly the Germans call them Russian roaches. Lots of finger-pointing going on... I don't care where they're from as long as they stay out of the bathtub. That's all.