Ten years ago in this column (October 1998, to be exact), I raised the issue of phone etiquette (you’ll have to get the book to read it now). So it’s high time for an update, especially now that every Russian has a cell phone (and every second Muscovite has two!).
One’s мобильный телефон is commonly called a мобильник (note the “rough” suffix ник), мобила, or, more tenderly, мобилка.
Take note, however: today, no Russian under 30 uses the verb позвонить. Instead, it is the era of набрать (from набрать номер – to dial a number). A twentysomething says “набери мне” (literally “dial me”) instead of “позвони мне.” Or, worse, “набери меня.” A typical statement is: “Я ему набрал, а он не берёт.” This means, of course, “I dialed him, but he did not pick up.” Yet an unwitting translator, absent context, could correctly translate this as, “I picked some (flowers, mushrooms, whatever) for him, but he wouldn’t take them.”
In a similar vein, no one ends a conversation any longer with “созвонимся” (the laughably non-committal, “let’s call one another”). This has been shortened to a derived noun: созвон. Some will also use the cringe-worthy (i.e. stylistically awful) “на связи.”
Then there is the standard recorded statement you’ll hear when the person you are calling is out of reach: “Вызываемый вами абонент недоступен или находится вне зоны доступа сети” (“the person you are trying to reach is unavailable or beyond the zone served by our network”). So cliché has this phrase become, that it comprises the chorus in a pop song by the group Город 312 (City 312):
Вне зоны доступа мы не опознаны Вне зоны доступа мы дышим воздухом Вне зоны доступа вполне осознанно Вне зоны доступа мы Вне зоны доступа мы Вне зоны доступа
No one knows us out of zone We can breathe the air out of zone We made a point to be out of zone We are out of zone We are out of zone Out of zone
Not only stupid, but, as John Cleese puts it in A Fish Called Wanda,: “stupidissimo.” But what can you do?
Cell phones have themselves changed. Now they must have a color display screen (цветной дисплэй) and a фотик (note the youth slang for “camera”). Similarly, youngsters say “сфоткаться на мобильник” (to have one’s picture taken with a mobile phone). This sort of Russian is what we call моветон, from the French mauvaix ton (“bad tone, bad manners”). Or perhaps mauvaix phone. (Sorry!)
Appellations for different mobile phone pricing plans abound. A few of the main ones are: безлимитный тариф (unlimited calling rate), любимый номер (favorite number), три любимых номера (three favorites). I used to be on the unlimited plan myself. But eventually, juggling two jobs, I was dogged by too many stupidissimo questions day and night. It seems I was always “in the zone,” which is rather ironic, since not that long ago, to say one was “в зоне” in Russian meant one was in prison. So I turned my мобила into a one-way device and only switch it on when I need to call someone.
You see, I am a firm believer that мобильники corrupt people, making them lazy. Take the simple metro station rendezvous. A young girl stands at the metro entrance, yelling into her cell, “Ты где?” (“Where are you?”), when, if she had just looked around, she would have seen that she was спиной к спине (back to back) with her friend. Instead of giving precise instructions about a meeting place, they’d rather набрать until they are in each other’s faces.
And don’t get me started about ринг-тоны (ringtones) downloaded from the internet. First, it adds yet another unneeded English borrowing to our “great and mighty” language. Second, the ringtones themselves turn a simple function into an irritating fashion statement.
Finally, even the way we pay for our phones is awkwardly expressed. When a kid’s phone account is empty (most all Russians prepay for talk time, unlike the minutes per month plans in the U.S.), he’ll ask his mom, “положи мне денег на телефон.” He is not asking her to stack bills on his beloved мобилка, but to deposit some money into his account. Should mom tarry, the youth’s number might be temporarily blocked (временно заблокирован) and it might be some time before it is unblocked (разблокирован).
Surely some will dismiss all this as just the rants of an old linguistic preservationist. Perhaps. But why should embracing new technology require dumbing down one’s language?
На связи…
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