Tired of a glamorous life

Russian lawmakers recently handed down a warning: Watch your Russian language! (See Notebook, page 7). The resolution may stick in the craw of free-speech advocates, the “liberal” intelligentsia, and “zapadniki” (Westernizers), but it strikes just the right note for “slavyanofily” (Slavophiles). If they were alive today, Slavophile Fyodor Tyutchev might applaud the measure, while Westernizer Pyotr Chaadaev (who said that the only thing Russians had to teach humankind was how to oppress one another) would smirk at such  “kvasnoy patriotism”–(kvas-patriotism).

Side-stepping the centuries-old Slavophile vs. Westernizers debate, I feel our Duma deputies should get kudos for at least drawing attention to this acute problem. The infamous “novoyaz” (pejorative contraction for “novy yazyk,” “new language”) makes many Russians cringe, myself included.

It has been at least seven years since the word “razborka”(“settlement of accounts”) entered our lexicon through the “back door.” It is a mob corruption of a pre-existing word that means “taking apart, dismantling, sorting out.” And the infiltration is so complete that we do not even recognize the word in its original meaning. As when an announcement pasted to Moscow’s Intourist Hotel  pronounced “Razborka by Ingeokom” (see photo). At first, I jumped to the conclusion that, for some strange reason, a local, Intourist-centered mob group was seeking a little P.R. for its settlement of accounts, but then the old meaning of the word came back and I remembered the hotel was being dismantled.

In fact, we journalists and translators should be the ones to take the heat for linguistic incongruities. Like writers and artists, we are on the cutting edge of linguistic invention. And, when someone like TV anchor Yevgeny Kiselyov talks about a political squabble as a “razborka,” the genie is out of the bottle: millions of TV viewers have heard the usage, and, like the sparrow in the Russian proverb, “once it’s out, you can’t catch it.” So next it shows up in headlines in Kommersant and the infiltration is complete.

The bill in question, in addition to barring crude slang from the media and public speeches, bars unnecessary use of foreign words “if they have Russian equivalents.” Of course, one hopes that common sense will reign here and we won’t fall victim to Russians’ penchant for “peregiby” (“extremes, distortions”). Like in the 1920s, when a similar campaign sought to stomp out adopted foreign words like “inzhener” (engineer) and replace them with artificially-constructed Russian words. After all, what’s the point of calling a hamburger a “bulochka s myasom” (“bun with meat”)?

The general approach here is simple: don’t invent words, but don’t sit back and let foreign imports usurp a perfectly capable synonym. For example, a pager in Russian is a “peydzher,” period. It should never be, say, a “vyzovitel.” A sputnik in English is a sputnik. A soviet is a soviet, not a council.

So why would Kommersant use the word “glamurny” (“glamorous”) to describe a devushka when we have the Russian words velikosvetsky, modny, svetsky and yarky? Why not go one step further, completely give up on one’s native tongue and say “glamurny girl”?

Of course, one can argue that language is a natural, often spontaneous phenomenon. Sure, but even the most ardent economic reformers agree that our new market economy requires some regulatory measures. The same is true of our language.

But again, common sense should prevail. For instance, I would welcome abolition of the Russian transliteration “slot-mashina” (slot-machine), even though what stands in the wings is “igralny avtomat” (“avtomat” being hardly a Russian word). But that’s OK. Avtomat is something which came to Russia because Russians didn’t have this reality. Anyway…

There is another reason this issue is aktualny (“topical, pressing”). It is that the Russian first lady has made the Russian language her “cup of chai,” and is urging her fellow citizens to think about the way we speak. In fact, some observers speculate that this is why Duma deputies, who are now voting enthusiastically in favor of all draft laws, nearly unanimously approved the bill.

Ironically, Mrs. Putin’s husband, our president, occasionally allows himself what we call here neparlamentskiye vyrazheniya (“unparliamentary expressions”—see our cover story). Whether his wife has incited any razborki with him on this score is anyone’s guess. But the man, not the linguist, in me can sympathize. For I read here a yearning for a simpler life: tired of all this glamurnaya life of his, the current resident of the Kremlin is venting his internal tension. It must give him the same relaxation (relaksatsiya) as when he is throwing a sparring partner (sparring-partnyor) on the tatami.

Nota bene: Students of Russian should take my word for it: don’t learn the empty adjective glamurny (and for “relaxation” we have the perfect Russian rasslableniye), nor should you try to find Russian equivalents for “tatami” or “sparring partner.” These words came to Russia from abroad and will stay as they are.

— Mikhail Ivanov