You Can Leave Your Hat On

In the run-up to January's US and Russia-led talks on Syria, Secretary of State John Kerry presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with two gigantic Idaho potatoes. In return, the Russian delegation offered state department spokesperson Jen Psaki a шапка-ушанка (a Russian fur hat with ear-flaps). The exchange set my linguistic gears in motion.

Gone are the лихие девяностые (tumultuous 1990s) when Россия ходила с шапкой по миру (was walking around hat in hand, i.e. begging for money from the IMF and World Bank). Now we use a shapka as a diplomatic gift.

Never mind that Psaki's shapka was розовая (pink), which is not something you see too often on Russian streets.* As we say, “По Сеньке и шапка!” (everyone gets the hat that fits, i.e. what they deserve or are entitled to). The idiom comes from the times of old Rus, when the degree of nobility and wealth of the boyars was signified by the height of their fur hats. And so, when we tell people “не по Сеньке шапка,” it means they are aiming too high or are trying to get something they don't deserve.

Many foreign students of Russian likely have what we call шапочное знакомство (superficial familiarity) with shapka-related idioms. This nice phrase – шапочное знакомство – comes from the tradition of doffing one's шапка in greeting (meaning someone you know by sight, but have never gotten to know). “Мы с ним знакомы шапочно” means “I barely know him.” However, and this is important, in old Rus, rather than снимать шапку перед кем-то (remove one's hat before someone), Russians used the expression ломать шапку, literally “to break one's hat.” With time, “ломать шапку перед кем-то” came to mean “to be submissive, to humble oneself before someone.”

Meanwhile, another verb phrase, получить по шапке, does not mean what you might expect, say, “to receive a hat.” No, it means to be reprimanded, dismissed or even punished: “to be sent packing” or “to get it in the neck.”

But back to hat removal... According to another custom, men had to remove their shapkas and drop them in a pile at the church entrance. When the service was over, they would разбирать (retrieve) their шапка. This led to the idiom прийти к шапочному разбору (разбор derives from the verb разбирать) – “arrive for the sorting through of shapkas,” which means to arrive late.

“Шапки – долой!” applies to funerals, as we remove our шапка in memoriam of one who has passed. Thus the lyrics from a modern song, “И шапки долой, и рюмку до дна, за этого пацана!” (“Hats off and drain your glasses to honor the memory of this lad”). There is also the famous line from Pushkin's Boris Godunov, “Тяжела ты, шапка Мономаха!” (“Heavy is the hat [crown] of Monomakh,” which speaks to the burdens of leadership).

A funny idiom with equally ancient roots is на воре и шапка горит (literally, “a thief's hat will always burns”), which means that guilty persons will inevitably be betrayed by their behavior. It derives from a folk tale in which a wise man helped unmask a thief at a market by yelling out: “The thief's hat is one fire!” causing the thief to reflexively touch his head and give himself away.

At this point, I should note that our equivalent for “I take my hat off to you” uses the word шляпа (not шапка): “Cнимаю шляпу!”

Finally, there is my favorite hat-related phrase: шапкозакидательские настроения (literally “hat-throwing moods”). Initially it referred to situations where one force had such numerical superiority over its enemy that if every soldier threw his hat the enemy would be buried under an avalanche of shapkas. With time, the idiom evolved, and the presumptuous “шапками закидаем” (often used with sports) is now associated with unfounded bragging and dangerous underestimation of one's opponent (or the immensity of a task).

So if you have bought yourself a шапка-ушанка, don't hurry to throw it at your opponents. Or, to quote an American rocker many Russians of my generation know more than шапочно, “You can leave your hat on!”

* Thankfully for bilateral relations, no one explained at the time that the idiom ходить под красную шапку, literally to go about beneath a red (or in this case rose-colored) shapka, means to serve as someone's soldier, because long ago Russian soldiers wore red shapkas.