Thread: Getting rid of the pseudo-Russian slang here

Firstly, slang is inevitable and crucial part of any language. Or you can claim that you have never ever used slang in your speech?

Secondly, what questions do you expect to come up here? There is no suprise that there are a lot of questions about slang being asked here. Think about it, if a word is used in its literal or usual and normal figurative sense, you can easily understand the word or effortlessly look it up in a dictionary. But this is the whole new story if you ran across a slang word or a slang expression. You can't understand it, even though you might be already familiar with the word or words. You probably can't look them up in a dictionary because they usually don't contain slang words or slang meanings of usual words. So what are you going to do? Of course, you're going to check up with native speakers on these matters.

Third of all, how is a non-native Russian speaker supposed to know whether they came across a slang word or expression? Of course, there might be some clues to determine a word or expression to be slang, but there mightn't be. That leads us to the fourth statement.

Fourth of all, this has to be a moderator who organizes all slang related questions into a slang section of the forum. But would our moderator not mind this extra (and maybe absolutely inapt) work?

Originally Posted by iCake

Firstly, slang is inevitable and crucial part of any language.

Idiots are also inevitable part of any culture, but they can at least disguise as eccentric ones at times. Slang cannot disguise itself.

Originally Posted by iCake

how is a non-native Russian speaker supposed to know whether they came across a slang word or expression?

If you are reading a book about criminal events of the 90s you are supposed to know what you are dealing with. That's surely not the type of language you are expected to use when you address a person in the street or converse with your host when you stay in Russia or Ukraine.

Originally Posted by iCake

this has to be a moderator who organizes all slang related questions into a slang section of the forum.

You assume that in most cases people cannot relate to what they are asking about and, hence, cannot put it into the section the context suggests. But what if I say that 80-90% of the people asking questions about slang know it is about slang, because:
a) they know it from the abstract of the book they are reading
b) they can't look up these words or phrases in the dictionary
c) the machine translation tools they may use do not understand such language
Even if some of the questions make their way into the wrong section, it won't do much damage to that section. But having questions about aristocratic language of the past centuries and questions about criminal jargon following one another is beyond ridiculous.

Originally Posted by NextOfKeen

If you are reading a book about criminal events of the 90s you are supposed to know what you are dealing with.

Couldn't agree more. Now I remember SPERK was reading such kind of book. I hope SPERK is reading this thread))) I explained to SPERK that the word "борзой" is very much like criminal slang... It seems noone told SPERK this language is very criminal.. But SPERK is probably totally OK with it and knows this is non-standard language... Anyway, it would be nice to hear all the parties involved.