How did the Ukrainians dare to appropriate the Russian mat?
Ukrainian police published dozens of telephone conversations in the army, consisting almost entirely of foul language. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians themselves, with the help of two or three rich swear words, manage to aim their missiles at the target and infuriate the Russian commander in chief. Why do Russians and Ukrainians control their common uterine bladder so differently, our constant stimulant is Doctor of Philology Gasan Huseynov.
“Russkaya Pravda” was the name of the first collection of the original Kievan Rus, compiled in the Old Russian language – the volume of the common root from which the modern Russian and Ukrainian languages grew and grew. In this document, discovered for almost a thousand years, there are a sufficient number of discovered cases of captivity, and found – slavery. Understandable to most modern speakers of the Russian language and the Ukrainian language, there are only two or three words left from the former richness of the description of the slaves. Of all these privates, purchases or in circulation today, only a stink and a serf.
Little is known about the language of ordinary people. But I know the laws about them. Two things, two ideas stretch from this history of the ancients to the present day. The first meeting that this developed lack of rights has reached our very time, just smerds in the new Russian language are state employees, purchases are contract employees, and serfs in general are gopniks. The second idea concerns language. It is believed that we are talking about the lower strata of the population. Some attribute sacred or blasphemous properties to this speech. Special power to this language, called obscene assembly, by the decision of the majority, its prohibition and almost secrecy.
But if this language were really secret, then why is it so widely available to them? How does society accept a ban on it in the public sphere?
Pushkin, who willingly visits on the occasion of obscene speech, in the broadest sense of this language, is a substitute for political and civil freedom. Dostoevsky tested him in the so-called thick of people’s life, among his comrades in penal servitude. Dostoevsky’s significant maternal language is an expression of the base nature of man. For him, checkmate is a substitute for the double tower, to which the foul-mouthed dooms himself.
As soon as there is at least some semblance, increasing freedom, this double compulsion – voluntary in speech and forced in way of life – will disappear, and foul language will turn out to be approximately what it is among foreigners who do not know our spiritual life.
Dostoevsky: a single word, for example, the discovery of an erect penis, can, in the presence of prefixes and suffixes, describe any phenomenon, state and mood.
There is only one question: “Why do language users do this? Why are there not enough ordinary words, you can often exchange fearlessly and calmly in a dialogue?
But the fact is that in Soviet times, the state, schools, cultural institutions, publishers and compilers of dictionaries imposed an agreement on all native speakers, according to which it, the state, can twist the usual expression in its own way, without allowing swear words in it. under what kind.
Prohibited for use, the mother tongue turned out to be a very rude, but very effective counterfactual. In Soviet times, the user of this language in a simple way marked the sincerity and reliability of his statement. Obscene turns in the interjection, without fixing any independent meaning, except for the sacred.
The word concluded with the euphemism “damn” at the beginning of the sentence is, as it were, “truly.”
The last word in the sentence, now shortened to the parliamentary form “nah”, is, as it were, “amen.”
By the end of the Soviet era, the former smerds, whitewashed serfs, ryadoviches, purchasers and progressive gopniks, were released with the full realization that the mother tongue has nothing bad in it, that it is ordinary language, just a little bit more capacious and sharp. than the one that they experienced the school and the state. came to the stage of theaters and movie screens, filled the obscene Russian and world Internet pages in its own very opposite function, which can be used only from the recent past, but also developed.
When Vladimir Putin came to power, the contrast between official, state lies and free will began to be perceived by everyone else. The authorities decided to strangle this terrible phenomenon, which is so understandable to all citizens. And in 2014 – literally simultaneously with the first second in Ukraine – the State Duma adopted, and President Putin elected a decree banning swearing in all cultural institutions. A year earlier, swearing was banned in the media.
At the decisive moment, the president proposed the proximity of the Russian Federation to free Ukraine, where even their representatives were never brought down, the head of the neighboring aggressive country – Russia – was called scattered Russian-Ukrainian words. Later it was included in the dictionaries of the Russian language in the moderate censored form “Puilo”.
Despite his personal affinity for foul language and bawdy jokes, Vladimir Putin adopted a ban on swearing from the very beginning. Each time, these attracted the attention of foreign publications, which turned to the current Russian important for clarification. So, in 2003, The New Yorker answered Viktor Erofeeva about this, who gave a short, but apparently not quite accessible answer to foreigners:
Once a mother-killer only on the street and in prisons, he penetrated opera, literature, the Internet and pop songs, he wrote. “Unlike obscenity in most other languages, our mate is so layered, multifunctional and flexible that it is more of a philosophy than a language.
At the height of the seizure of the Russian Federation in the Donbass, the British newspaper The Guardian did not notice the coincidence of the adoption of the next restrictions on the mat with the invasion of Ukraine. In an excellent yet editorial column on June 29, 2014, the newspaper, among the possessions, wrote:
Dostoevsky collected the phrase in his life. This word, “hui”, is the basis for 500 other words in one dictionary. [Плуцера-Сарно], from tomorrow’s public day are banned in accordance with the puritanical decrees of Vladimir Putin … Without him, Russia would be without the lubrication of the countless frictions of everyday life. And yet there will be no stopping. Putin’s goal was not so much to eradicate it as to hide it from prying eyes. He is publicly for a new Russia set up for repression. We raise twice to salute the Russian mat.
So we come to the second, after turning into a lubricating interjection, the properties of a swear dictionary. Swear words happen to be unusually productive, and from their meaning – the bright forbidden name of the sexual organ – the newly formed condition is given special strength and sharpness. Moreover, the swear word has its own aura, which owns the language to recharge from the most innocent-sounding words. For example, the word “star” (errative “published”), which rhymes easily from words currently banned from use in the Russian media.
Let’s not tease the geese and imagine that from this “whistle” you form the verb “whistle” in the meaning of decorate. Why use the language of this word at all? In my student years, in the early 1970s, I explained the semantic subtleties to foreign classmates and fellow students in this way: “You see, if something was “stolen”, “taken away” and even “stolen” from you, the thing can still be found. And if they “whistle”, then it’s forever. ” And so it is in everything.
Over the past years, the Russian mat has turned out to be both a useful weapon lubricant for Ukrainians and, if you like, an amplifying sight. Having got rid of the historical servility of the thousand-year-old Russkaya Pravda and the Soviet collective farm construction, the Ukrainians not only gave Putin himself a middle name.
During the war that began on February 24, 2022, hundreds of intercepted telephone conversations with ordinary families – wives, mothers, girlfriends – were published. What is possible in such conversations? Solid mat. More precisely, as they usually say in such cases, “checkmate”. The same one that Ukrainians often accompany footage shot in war-torn places and villages of Ukraine. In addition to the common for those and other elected, Ukrainians also set the direction for the Russian language under the speaking name “Moscow”.
It is known that the leadership of the Russian Federation and the Russian army and navy are superstitious. So, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, had a church relic on its doorstep – a fragment of a wooden cross, the same cross on which, according to Christian legend, Jesus was crucified. What was the disappointment of believers and the prosecutor’s office when it became known that Ukrainian missiles “Neptune” sank the cruiser shortly after the border guard from the island “Snake” sent the “Russian ship” to mother, or to an address well known to both Russians and Ukrainians.
How did it turn out that the formula of the Ukrainian soldier turned out to be more significant than the incantation of the clergyman during the ceremony of fixing the fragment of the cross on the warship? How did it happen that in the mouths of Ukrainians these swear words acquired the performativity that Russian soldiers lost?
The Russian army may have a numerical advantage over the Ukrainian one. But, as happens to the Greeks in the battle of Salamis with the Persians, the Ukrainians are now fighting back, like free people, from smerds, from whitewashed serfs of the Russian Tsar. As a reincarnation of Xerxes, Ukrainians branded it with a public swear word. Now, when two communities that use Russian swearing on an equal footing have collided on the battlefield, we, with the full right to collect about the times of Kievan Rus and a common common language, have now diverged further than ever before in our history.