By Maria Goikhberg

My brother has a habit of incorporating Russian expressions in his everyday English. In Russian they make sense and come naturally in conversation, but hearing them so far from their native environment is always very jarring, and frequently makes me realise how strange these expressions actually are. Unusual as they are if one stops and thinks about them, they unite many Russian speakers in understanding and experiencing the world.

For instance, many of those growing up in Russian households have a collective memory of eating too many sweets as children, and being told ‘попа слипнется (popa slypnetsa)’, or ‘your butt will get stuck together’. This led to many shared childhood imaginings of the horrible, and very physical feeling of not being able to unstick your butt: something which, especially as children, many of us felt to our core. The most interesting part of this, and many other graphic expressions, is many years later sitting in a biology class and only then realising that what scared you as a child was not a medical possibility, but rather a clever and effective turn of language.

It is not uncommon for animals to appear in Russian expressions that sting, but don’t fully insult those they are directed at. In moments of my confusion and my mother’s irritation, it was not uncommon for her to ask me why I was looking at her like a ‘баран на новые ворота (baran na noviye vorota)’, or a ‘ram at new gates’. The expression originates from herding animals into the wrong enclosures, after which they would fall into a stupor. Similarly, If I ever lapsed in observation, or made a silly error, it was not uncommon for the word ‘goat’ to be thrown around. Though these animal likenesses are not expressly insulting, they express sharp disappointment. People rarely want to feel like goats, rams, or any other wide-eyed farm animal, and these expressions really get at that.

Likening oneself to food is also common in Russian expressions. Feeling like a ‘выжатый лимон (vizhatiy limon)’, or ‘squeezed lemon’, seemed to perfectly capture someone who looked tired or drained. My favourite expression for someone looking busy is a ‘деловая колбаса (delovaya kolbasa)’, or ‘business sausage’, which evokes the prideful waddle that comes with acting more important than you really are. This saying, apart from being applied to adults who take themselves too seriously, is also heard when describing particularly busy-looking toddlers or very focused animals.

Some expressions I grew up with felt very ritualistic. For example, when wishing someone luck, it was insufficient to say ‘good luck’, with a simple ‘удачи (udachi)!’, which carries neither enough emotion, nor gravitas. Instead, one would solemnly wish ‘ни пуха, ни пера (ni puha, ni pera)’, or ‘no fluff, no feather’, to which the recipient was meant to respond ‘to the devil!’ and nothing else, for fear of jinxing it. The expression originated from wishing hunters luck bringing home animals, rather than just fluff, or feathers. There was many a scene where I would rush out of a room having said ‘thank you’ to my wishes of ‘no fluff, no feather’, and a room of disappointed Russians would wail “to the devil!” back at me, worried I had jinxed myself.

Some of these expressions have equivalents in other languages, some of them don’t. Some expressions only live in certain households. Only last week I discovered that my favourite expression, ‘с каких пирогов (s kakih pirogov)!’, directly translated as ‘from which pies!’ and equivalent to the English ‘why on earth!?’, doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on the internet. Someone used it at a family gathering when I was young, and it has been in my vocabulary since. This discovery, shocking and disappointing as it was, goes to show that the expressions we use growing up really do shape our experience of the world, and our understanding of our own cultures. Whether an expression is used by a whole culture, a certain language, or only some families, they carry memory and meaning that go far beyond their direct translations.

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