Ozwords (a blog from the Australian National Dictionary Centre) The Calvert Journal (“a daily briefing on the culture and creativity of modern Russia”) I have strong opinions and sometimes express myself more sharply than an ideal interlocutor might, but I try to avoid personal attacks, and I hope you will do the same. Also, my posts should be taken as conversation-starters there is no expectation of “staying on topic,”and some of the best threads have gone in entirely unexpected directions. And occasionally the software will decide a comment is spam and it won’t even go into moderation if a comment disappears on you, send me an e-mail and I’ll try to rescue it. If your comment goes into moderation (which can happen if it has too many links or if the software just takes it into its head to be suspicious), I will usually set it free reasonably quickly… unless it happens during the night, say between 10 PM and 8 AM Eastern Time (US), in which case you’ll have to wait. You will not only get your purchases, you will get my blessings and a karmic boost! (I don’t otherwise participateĪnd you can support my book habit without even spending money on me by following my Amazon links to do your shopping (if, of course, you like shopping on Amazon) As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases (I get a small percentage of every dollar spent while someone is following my referral links), and every month I get a gift certificate that allows me to buy a few books (or, if someone has bought a big-ticket item, even more). If your preferred feed is Twitter, you can follow to get My name is Steve Dodson I’m a retired copyeditor currently living in western Massachusetts after many years in New York City. Wonder why that is.Ĭommented-On Language Hat Posts (courtesy of J.C. Then we rated the words from one to ten for how emotionally loaded they were or how much they twisted the knife. I was pretty young and totally shocked at some of the words one of the guys knew–I wasn’t even sure what they all meant. I remember years ago when I was 18 or so, I took some weird class where we sat down and listed all the pejorative words for men and women. Doesn’t seem to be a mommy complex either. While the boomer men I prefer don’t seem to pay me any attention, the GenX’s more than make up for it. Otherwise you would refer to them as “gentlemen”.įor ladies there is “cougar” which implies lustful desperation plus some kind of predation on younger males, which as far as I can tell isn’t particularly apt. My students call me “teacher”, “maestra” (Spanish,) or “sitt” (Arabic) my family and coworkers call me by name.Ī geezer usually refuses to wear his false teeth and has an odd appearance a codger is intractable in some way. In any case, it certainly is a funny sentence.Īre we going to do pejoratives for various demographic groups now? Since I can’t find any other trace of the existence of either Uksusov or Muskusov, I’m guessing they’re inventions of Dovlatov and Okun respectively. But who’s going to reread the entirety of Our great century to determine the definitive truth?’). Dovlatov attributes the sentence to “писателя Уксусова” (‘the writer Uksusov’) this story by Mikhail Okun repeats Dovlatov’s quote but attributes it to one Ivan Muskusov, “one of the most ancient members of the Union of Writers,” whose only remembered work was the two-volume Наш великий век (Our great century/age), from which he claims the quote is taken… but “Не исключено, впрочем, что Сергей Донатович мог придумать это сам. I googled it and discovered it’s from the notebooks of Sergei Dovlatov, a wonderful writer I discovered for myself back when I was wandering the Russian shelves of the late lamented Donnell Library pulling out books at random. Anatoly mentions what he calls “the funniest sentence in the Russian language,” “Коза закричала нечеловеческим голосом” (‘the goat cried out in an inhuman voice’).
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