PPKS

(new Russian)

This strange abbreviation has been surfacing in Russian online discussions for some time now.

ППКС (peh-peh-kah-es or pehpex) simply means 'I sign under every word of it' — 'подписываюсь под каждым словом'. Alternatively, it may mean 'I totally agree with what is said' — 'полностью присоединяюсь к сказанному'.

As Lurkmore notes with their usual sarcasm, it is used mostly by people who haven't much to say but are itching to say something. Lurkmore, though not your usual dictionary or Wikipedia, should be recommended as a lively and usually reliable source on modern Russian idioms.

It's not clear how and when exactly the acronym appeared. It may be suggested that it was a side-effect of the popularity of the qualifying IMHO (in my humble opinion, ИМХО in Russian). Someone may have decided to invent an opposite, something short and assertive instead of the wobbly IMHO. 

Comp.

(New Russian)

Computer, in English usually contracted to PC or a Mac, if you are a mac fan, in Russian has become a comp — комп. It is a contraction from компьютер.

The o sound is distinct while the p struggles and appears distinctively pronounced when the word is declined and a vowel appears after the p, i.e. genitive - компа.

A search in the National Corpus of Russian Language shows a puzzling appearance of the word since 1820, probably in a different sense, but the current usage takes off in the naughties (see the diagramme here and examples here). My explanation is that in that decade the coinage, originally childspeak, had been increasingly adopted first by parents, who started using it themselves, and then, as the children of the 90s grew up, by the general public. Comp for computer became a widely used replacement for the full computer, both in spoken and written speech.

The word computer (компьютер) itself is of course from English. It has replaced the 50-60s word ЭВМ (электронно-вычислительная машина - electronic computing machine). What is fascinating about comp is that it appears to be an original home-grown Russian derivative. 'Comp' in English is used for a variety purposes, compilation, comparison etc., but not for a computer. (see this Wikipedia article)

See other Tetradki articles on new Russian by clicking here or on the Pushkin icon. Pushkin graphic by A.Anichkin.

Sebyashka.

Just discovered a new Russian word for 'selfie' — sebyashka (себяшка).

It comes from the word себя — self. To take a photo of yourself — сделать фото себя, сфотографировать себя, снять себя. Себя also contracts to ся in the endings of reflexive verbs and participles.

Add diminutive suffix -shk- (-шк-) and feminine ending -a and you get a sebyashka. The coinage has a good chance of staying on as it comes out naturally and rings similarly to many other common words, eg. rubashka — shirt. It certainly will compete with the English borrowing селфи (selfie) and all but conquered another home-grown word for a selfie, samostrel (самострел — self-shoot).

Friends on Facebook say that it has been around for a few years, others agreed it's the first time they see. One mother said she'd heard it first from her children, and a language professor said that she had already had students analyze the word.

I made a contribution to further the sebyashka by suggesting a verbal form: себятить (imperfect aspect) and отсебятить (perfect aspect). The professor friend promised she'd give my new verb proper credit (to myself) when introducing her students to it.

Here is how I otsebyatil sebya (otsebyatilsya) — made a sebyashka selfie of myself.

Read also 'Selfie in Russian'

Smileyk.

The internet 'smiley' has been adopted into Russian, but with a diminutive suffix -k. It's not смайли, but смайлик — smileyk or smileek.

It's an interesting case of morphological change as it gives the word masculine gender and also allows declension. If it stayed as it is in English - смайли - it would require neutral gender and no declension. Most probably the change stems from the natural language inclination towards ease of use.

This one is by me, see it on my I Work in Pages blog.

Little Green Men.

Little green men in Simferopol.

(new Russian)

Russian special forces that have been used against Ukraine, without insignia and on a deniable basis of course, have acquired the name "зеленые человечки" — little green men.  

It is noted, among others, by a popular blogger Ilya Varlamov (Илья Варламов), who has close relatives in Crimea. (Varlamov's blog is here.)  Varlamov doesn't explain where the new nickname appeared or who was the first to use it.

This is what he writes:

'Not to upset anyone I will just call the unidentified military 'the allegedly Russian military'. Local jokingly call them 'the polite people', 'Crimean self-defence or just 'little green men.' (In Russian: Чтобы никого не расстраивать, неопознанных военных я буду называть «предположительно русские военные». Местные в шутку называют их «вежливые люди», «крымская самооборона» или просто «зеленые человечки».)

I am just noting this as an amusing example of back translation, perhaps subliminal, of the English meme for aliens. The term apparently first established itself in the USA in 1950s on the wave of reports of encounters with extraterrestrial aliens. Some described them as small humanoids with green skin and elongated heads. As time passed the expression got a shade of irony to itself. It began to mean an account that is hard to believe.

Which fits exactly with what has been happening in Crimea and then in Eastern Ukraine.

A note on grammar. Russian is profusely rich in suffixes, especially diminutive. The word for man (generic) is человек. Add diminutive -ek, mutate k to ch and get человечек — little man. In plural it's человечки — chelovechki.

Some English language reports simply use 'green men' which is okay but misses the shrewdness of local attitudes.

Read the Russian version of this article here.

Wikipedia article on little green men is here.

Фото: Elizabeth Arrott, VOA, отсюда.

#Крым "Зеленые человечки"

The Great Genby.

A little fun with new Russian.

Genby.
Photo: www.kremlin.ru

Digital age and and a country open to outside world created entirely new ways for language creativity.

Take this, for example. Switching from one language to another also requires, when writing, switching your keyboard settings. In the case of Russian, switching from Latin alphabet to Cyrillic. Many Russians soon discovered that typing in Russian when the keyboard is switched to English creates quite a few fun words. And vice versa.

If you type 'Dear' to start a formal letter, in Cyrillic it becomes 'Вуфк' that sounds Woofk. A nonsense word that doesn't mean anything but sounds onomatopoeic both in Russian and in English with 'oof' and 'уф' interjections as the most obvious. Russian 'oof' has the same meaning as in English. I have a friend with whom we use 'Вуфк' as a regular greeting in correspondence.

If you touch-type Putin in Russian with the standard Cyrillic фыва-олдж keyboard in mind but with the Qwerty layout switched on, the name becomes Genby. It is now becoming an internet meme in its own right.

And the most popular reverse word that sprung from the switched keyboard phenomenon is ЗЫ. ZY, pronounced z-yee with the hard Russian ы sound, is nothing but PS, a postscript. But it also has an added weight of introducing a punch line, an ironic or sarcastic conclusion to one's blog post or a social network update. Probably because it sounds similar to 'гы', a Russian interjection, expressing impish glee.

Selfie in Russian.

самострел vs селфи

Helle Thorning-Schmidt.

As Obama and Cameron were taking selfies with the blonde Danish Prime-Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt while attending the Mandela memorial service I thought I should mention that selfie the word is battling with the word samostrel (самострел) in the Russian language.

Samostrél (stress on e) literally means self-shot, strel being the noun formed from the verb стрелять - to shoot. Until the recent proliferation of its self-portrait meaning samostrel meant a self-inflicted unjury (self-harming), specifically, of a soldier trying to avoid front line service, with all the negative connotations. Samostrel also means a crossbow or a child's toy — a pistol or a crossbow, or a dart shooting device made of an empty spool with a piece of rubber band attached to it.

Today samostrel competes with the English borrowing селфи or сэлфи in being the word for a digital photo of oneself that Oxford Dictionaries pronounced the word of the year 2013. Google search gives 221 thousand hits for селфи and 358 thousand for сэлфи. For самострел Google gives 483 thousand hits, but considering the overlapping of the meaning, it is safe to assume that the two words are now neck and neck, perhaps with a slight advantage to селфи. Curiously, the Russian Wikipedia has an article on селфи (with an e) which doesn't mention the word samostrel. And there is an article on self-harming that mentions samostrel.

By the way, a Danish editor, who was interviewed today on the radio, said that there was no Danish word for selfie, they just use the English one.

We will see how it works out in Russian. Early in the 20th Century two words were competing for airplane (aeroplane) — аэроплан and самолёт (samolët). Samolet won even though аэроплан is still used occasionally but has a definite archaic flavour.

Read another post on Russian selfie — Sebyashka.

Photo: Mogens Engelund, from here.

Cosmonaut. (New Russian)

A cosmonaut, of course, is the Soviet/Russian equivalent of astronaut. The word is derived from cosmos, in its Russian meaning of space, and -naut - navigator.

The Russian word entered English at the dawn of space exploration, in the early 1960s, after Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, rocketed into orbit.

Recent protests in Russia, which began late in 2011, gave 'cosmonaut' a new meaning. It became a nickname for officers of riot police in heavy gear. Presumably, because large helmets with sliding visors resemble the look of a cosmonaut in spacesuit. It is a slang meaning mostly used by opposition bloggers and commentators on social networks.

Here's one example, from here:
На площади перед метро 'Чистые пруды' появляются омоновцы-'космонавты' в черных круглых шлемах, в нагрудниках, со щитами и дубинами.
[In the square in front of the metro station 'Chistye Prudy' there begin to appear OMON-cosmonauts in black round helmets, wearing breast-plates and carrying shields and batons.']

Read a humorous 'encyclopedic' article on the cosmonauts here with more links and examples (in Russian), and see this Tetradki article on cosmonaut and other Russian space words in English. 

Photo by Александр Владимирович Плющев: 'Cosmonauts' in central Moscow.

Shirnarmass. (New Russian)

Shirnarmass — ширнармасс or, in plural, ширнармассы.

It's a funny Oriental sounding recent coinage from the Russian 'wide people's masses' — "широкие народные массы". I couldn't find, if there's an author to it but it seems to be circulating on its own, without any references to a source. A Google search gives over forty thousand hits on shirnarmass.

'Let's hit the beautiful with the useful, we shouldn't fall behind the shirnarmasses,' writes one blogger.

'All factions in the Duma voted for the new law, everybody wants to earn support of the shirnarmass,' says a commenter on an internet forum.

It is used in roughly the same way as hoi polloi in English, a derogatory or humorous reference to the masses, the unsophisticated or the ordinary.

'Wide people's masses' or simply 'masses' is an idiom deeply rooted in Soviet discourse. 'The masses' was something that the ruling nomenklatura swore by. They were the ones in the name of whom and for whom everything that was done or pronounced to be done ostensibly was being done. In aesthetics, 'the masses' were the touchstone by which any literary, artistic, musical or architectural work could have been judged. 'The masses' will accept this, good. 'This is alien to the masses, the masses don't need this, the masses don't understand this,' prepare for a period without work and pack a bag with bare necessities in case the masses decide that you'd be better off in the gulag.

Picture: a symbol of Russia, The Girl with an Oar, my design in progress, based on the sculpture by Ivan Shadr. This first version was rejected as unacceptable to the masses.  

Punch in. (New Russian)

I was swapping telephone numbers and other contact details with an editor in Moscow the other day. He used a verb I've never heard used in this context:

- Вбей себе мои номера на всякий случай.

(Punch in my numbers, just in case.)

Вбей is imperative of вбить (imperfective: вбивать.) It means to knock in, to drive in, to drive (a wedge) in, and, figuratively, to get into one's head, to knock into one's head.

Here, however, the reference is definitely to punching on the buttons of a mobile (or any button-operated) phone with the aim of putting the digits in its memory.

Update: This may change very soon, as a reader has just pointed out to me. More and more phones become tactile, so nobody 'punches in' anything anymore but taps!

©A.Anichkin/Tetradki. Pushkin with a RUS bumper sticker is my design, ask if you want to republish.

OMG (New Russian).

OMG - oh my god - has entered and firmly established itself in new Russian over the past few years.

Some, mostly young women, use it with relish, others complain about its omnipresence and ask whatever happened to the original Russian gospodi bozhe moy (господи, боже мой) - my good Lord.

In Cyrillics, it's transcribed as ОМГ, or omg. 

What makes OMG a case of special interest, is its pronunciation. An abbreviation mostly used in written speech, it is subject to all sorts of transformations in oral usage. I haven't actually heard it spoken, but have asked several times on social networks how Russians pronounce it.

Replies varied from 'omega' to 'oink'. Don't ask me how OMG becomes oink, it's just what they told me. 

See the recent entry on OMG in 'Dictionaries of the 21st Century' website here.

Bail-out. (New Russian)

In new Russian there are two competing spellings - бейл-аут and бейлаут. It is, I think, because, there are already two competing models. Time-out (or timeout, or time out) is given in dictionaries as тайм-аут. But similar Russian words, that were borrowed roughly at the same time, such as нокаут (knockout) and локаут (lockout) are spelled as one word, without the hyphen.

There are over a million references to бейл-аут on Russian Google, so it's fair to argue that the word is now part of the Russian language.

However, news reports on the Cyprus crisis and other items on the global financial tremors struggle to use пакет мер по спасению (rescue package), спасение (rescue), помощь (help), выручка (rescue) as substitutes for the hard-hitting bail-out. But Russia doesn't seem to offer anything as short and hard-hitting as the бейл-аут. In fact, I myself have just contributed to the proliferation of this new word by using it in my short blog-post 'Cyprus: the End of Europe' on BFM.ru.

And there is another consideration against writing бейлаут as one word — the proclivity of Muscovites to shift stresses to accommodate a natural inclination for an ultimate, or, in longer words, a penultimate stress. Маркетинг that popped up in the 90s is often pronounced as маркéтинг in Russian. What if бейлаут becomes бейла´yт? On the model of the fairly obscure but known арна´ут (a historical ethnonym for an Albanian)? God forbid!

Intelligentsia and Creative Class. (New Russian).

The term ‘creative class’ as applied to Russia means intelligentsia. And little more.

This post is simply to vent my irritation with the phrase ‘creative class’ (креативный класс) as applied to describe the educated, mobile, urban, high-earning, mostly liberal-minded and certainly independent-thinking professional Russians who formed the core of the opposition to the ruling ‘Putin.03’ group since September 2012, when the Putin-Medvedev ‘castling’ (рокировка) was announced. 

Since then the opposition has developed from spontaneous street protests bordering on riots to a more or less organised civic movement comprising several distinct groupings, including the traditional left (Udaltsov), anti-corruption fighters (Navalny), Russian nationalists, traditional anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, and a respectable but not represented in the Duma social-democratic/liberal party Yabloko (Yavlinsky, Mitrokhin) together with a number of other radical groups, including Solidarity movement (Солидарность, Garry Kasparov) and Parnas (Party of People’s Liberty - Партия народной свободы, Nemtsov). 

A number of more established and less radical political figures have either joined or supported opposition groups, notably the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov (himself a presidential candidate), the long-serving former finance minister Alexei Kudrin and the former Duma deputy and KGB colonel Gennady Gudkov. 

The governing establishment desperately sought to find catchy terms to discredit the opposition in the run-up to the elections of the President and the Duma. Somewhere inside the Kremlin think-tubs a range of terms was developed and circulated. Prominent among them were the 'Orangists' (оранжисты, referring to the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine), the 'non-system opposition' (несистемная or внесистемная оппозиция, referring to non-system, i.e. officially unrepresented opposition) and, the sneakiest of them all, ‘the creative class’. 

The implication of the term is that its members are too high-earning, too ‘well-fed’ (зажравшиеся), too urban, too West-orientated to understand and appreciate the enormous work that the Putin government has done to ‘raise Russia from her knees’ since the beginning of the 21st Century. And with this to drive a wedge between the protesting citizens of Moscow, Petersburg and other major cities and the less politically savvy and certainly poorer people of the rest of the country.

Whether it works or not, remains to be seen. What is striking is how similar the idea is to the treatment of intelligentsia under the Soviet regime. It had been defined as a ‘social stratum’ devoid of its own class consciousness, and as such not to be trusted. Intelligentsia was recognised as one of the three important social groups in the Soviet society, but it came third after after the working class and the ‘collectivised peasantry’ (колхозное крестьянство.) In fact, in agenda-setting Central Committee slogans, issued by the party twice a year, for May Day and for the October Revolution anniversary, the working class was described as ‘heroic’, the kolkhoz peasantry as ‘glorious’, but the intelligentsia only had the attributive epithet of ‘Soviet people’s’. (see an example here, slogans 10, 11 and 12.) 

One can argue with Richard Florida’s  idea of the creative class as the new driving force of the post-industrial world is right or wrong. It is difficult, though, to argue that ‘creative class’ is hardly different from the old and respected Russian notion of ‘intelligentsia’. We may have to take the moral steadfastness out. And the inherent liberal-mindedness too. But we can’t take out Florida’s own key distinctive feature of the creative class as the group of professional people who are more interested in ‘horizontal’ mobility, i.e. in the pursuit of satisfying work, rather than ‘vertical’ mobility, i.e. the advancement in administrative or managerial positions with a corresponding rise in remuneration.  

At any rate it is fascinating to see that over the past year some Russians have swallowed the self-identification of being one of ‘creative class’ without actually challenging the concept. The old self-identification of ‘intelligentsia’ having been denigrated and belittled in both ideological and economical ways under the Soviet regime for so long, it comes as little surprise.

Still others have seen through the risks of accepting the new definition. The Moscow News (“Московские новости”) newspaper runs a language column called Word and Anti-Word (“Слово и антислово”), where prominent personalities are asked to give their observations on the modern language. One recent interviewee was Marat Guelman (Марат Гельман, wiki), a modern art gallery owner and festival organiser. (Note another new Russian word: галерист - gallerist.)

Asked if there were any recent words or phrases that he thought of as alien to him, Guelman said

'I don’t use the words ‘creative class’. I think it’s a bit poshlo (vulgar). The phrase makes you feel as though people are just uncomfortable with saying ‘intellectual’ or ‘intellighent’. Among my friends there was only one, Edik Boyakov*, who had used the phrase ‘creative class’ without irony. And then only once — he said it and then understood how incongruous it was.'

Русская версия этой заметки здесь.

*Edouard Boyakov, Russian theatre and cinema producer and director. 

Видеорегистратор - Dashboard Camera. (New Russian)

Hidden in this detailed report about the Russian meteorite is a language gem: dashboard camera. In Russian it's called видеорегистратор, pronounced vEE-dee-oh-reh-ghee-strAH-tohr. It is, for many practical purposes, a video registrar, as this passage from the AP report explains:

Social media was flooded with video from the many dashboard cameras that Russians mount in their cars, in case of pressure from corrupt traffic police or a dispute after an accident.

While Tetradki couldn't find statistics on how many Russian cars are equipped with videoregistrators, reports suggest that they are installed en-masse and widely used. They should be really hailed as a tool of democracy and an evidence of a civic society emerging in Russia. Militant activists from the Blue Buckets movement ("Синие ведерки", wikipedia, in English, and lurkmore, in Russian, about them) have used footage from videoregistrators to prove abuse and arrogance of the high and mighty as they drive through red light, on the opposite lane and do spectacular u-turns in the middle of busy roads endangering the lives of ordinary citizens.

This is not the kind of word you'd quickly find in a Russian-English dictionary.

Here is a blood-curling video from the Blue Bucket repertoire, 2011. The chauffeur of a government Mercedes threatens to shoot a driver in front of him, if he doesn't let him pass. 'Do you want me to shoot you through the head, punk?' he shouts over the tanoy before speeding off. The scene, captured on videoregistrator, went viral on the Russian internet:



Update: In this article on Wired.com Damon Lavrinc goes into more details about videoregistrators and the meteor. The article includes a number of videos of the meteor and of Russian road accidents.
And Languagehat discusses the expletives that Russians use when cars crash or meteors fall from the sky. Languagehat's post contains more exciting links.

WhiR


ead more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/14/5192622/meteorite-falls-in-russian-urals.html#storylink=cpy

bluebuckets