Hurrah! I’m writing my first ever post about Russian. I have been thinking about it for quite a long time but was never sure if I could find readers for the posts about peculiarities of my mother tongue.
From time to time I would spot some funny expression I personally use, like “на вкус и цвет фломастеры разные” or “за уши не оттянуть” etc., and I would regret that I had nobody to share them with.
Now the ‘sharing’ question doesn’t bother me so much, I’m sure these articles will find their readers one day.
And now that I started speaking Russian with an Italian girl I began to pay more and more attention to the words and phrases that escape from my mouth. How bizzare some of them are!
And this is exactly what I yearn to write about!
Yesterday I was trying to find Babe movie on some Russian torrent tracker. And I, как умная Маша (like a clever Mary), wrote Бейб instead of Бэйб, because you never know how they would transliterate an English name to Russian. But I thought that the right variant was бэйб and so I typed it.
This expression is only used by girls/women since there is a girl’s name in it. And you will employ it when you try to do something properly, but it turns out that you’d better do like everybody else does. Another example:
Я, как умная Маша, пришла за полчаса до начала концерта, чтобы спокойно раздеться, привести себя в порядок, попить кофейку. А они только в здание впускать стали за десять минут до начала концерта!
I, like a clever Mary, came at 18.30, i.e. 30 minutes before the start of the show. I didn’t want to be in a rush, I wanted to take off my coat, go to the ladies room, take a cup of coffee. But can you imagine, they opened the main entrance only at 18.50!
Did you enjoy this post? Do you know any bizarre, funny, wierd, irrrational or simply beautiful Russian expressions? Don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments!)
Stay tuned!
*I chose this photo simply because Masha Malinovskaya was the first (dim-witted) person that came to mind. And it is a general notion that she is not so clever and not my humble opinion.