http://www.efl.ru/forum/threads/4288/

Mouthing Off

Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.

A new guide to current Russian youth slang helps aging hipsters -- foreign-born and local -- stay smooth with the changin' times.

By Michele A. Berdy

You've been studying Russian for years, living in Moscow for nearly a decade. You watch television, read the newspapers, enjoy evenings with Russian friends and communicate competently with your business partners. And then, one day, your 22-year-old office assistant says, Надо забомбить и трогать. We have to bomb them and touch them? Or your teenage step-daughter tells you, хватит колбаситься! That's enough sausage-making? What on earth are they talking about?

Welcome to the world of Russian slang. "The Big Dictionary of Youth Slang" (Большой словарь молодёжного сленга) by Svetlana Levikova, published by Fair Press, can guide you through the thicket of this jargon. For the uninitiated (i.e., anyone older than 30, regardless of nationality), надо забомбить и трогать means "We have to grab a bite to eat and get out of here," and хватит колбаситься means "Quit joking around." Don't feel bad if you didn't get it. Your Russian spouse and colleagues didn't get it either.

To help us we have Svetlana Levikova, the Professor Henry Higgins of Russian youth slang. Levikova has been eavesdropping for years on teenage Russian Eliza Doolittles and jotting down what they say. Unlike Higgins, however, she is not a linguist. She holds a doctorate in philosophy, teaches at Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, and has spent her academic career studying youth subculture as a social phenomenon. When the Fair Press publishing house asked her if she would compile a dictionary of youth slang, she was "in shock." "I wasn't a linguist, and I thought I'd come up with about 100 words or so." But she asked her children -- now aged 19, 21, and 22 -- if they would help. "Sit down and start taking down dictation," they said. Levikova started writing, and, after nearly three years of work, she had collected over 10,000 words and expressions.

Levikova gathered words from her children, their friends and her students. She pulled them out of newspapers for young people, television shows and the Internet. "I don't know why other people watched the television show 'Behind the Glass,' [Za Steklom] but I watched it for the language. I sat in front of the television with a pen and paper." Regional and institutional expressions quickly become universal. "Young people are extremely mobile. If a teenager comes to Moscow from Khabarovsk, he brings his slang with him. And it gets passed around in the mass media."

Why do young people develop their own dialect? "For the same reason we spoke pig Latin in childhood," Levikova notes. "To encode their language, to conceal what they are saying from us. There's nothing wrong with it. We all did this when we were younger." Should we insist they speak standard Russian? Levikova says no. "Everything has its place -- we shouldn't fight it. Let them play around with language. They'll grow out of it later."

In compiling the dictionary, Levikova consciously broke several canons of academic lexicography. She left out time determinants -- that is, what years a particular word or expression appeared and was used. "The slang changes quickly. At first, kids said, Забей! (Forget it.) Then they started saying, Забей на это. It's hard to say exactly when the second expression appeared. And then, words and expressions keep coming back, sometimes with different meanings. In the '60s we used the word стиляги, which meant guys with greased-back hair, tight pants, and platform shoes. Now the word is used to describe anyone who is a hot dresser."

She also took out the grammatical notes. "Take the word койка [literally, 'bed'] which is a noun, feminine gender. But it is used to mean 'having sex with someone.' Putting in the grammatical form had no meaning." Finally, she insisted on including stress marks. "Кретин, with the stress on the second syllable, means an 'imbecile,' but when it's on the first syllable, it is a mild term used to describe someone who has done something foolish," she explains.

The dictionary is organized into three parts: The first section gives "standard Russian" definitions of slang words and usages; the second section is made up of expressions and phrases, also "translated" into standard Russian, and the third is a reverse dictionary -- standard Russian words are listed alphabetically with translations into youth slang. Levikova is particularly proud of this last part. "It allows you to find the right word -- so you can talk to a young person in a language he understands. But it also shows what kids are concerned about. Some words only have one or two slang expressions, but others have lots of them. Where there are lots of words, we know it's something that concerns young people."

So what are Russian teenagers concerned about? Pretty much what has interested young people all over the world for decades: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Plus one modern addition: computers. If you are Russian and age 16 to 24, you call your computer аппарат, компик, компухтер, машина, тачила or числогрыз (the last is something like a "number cruncher" -- a number gnawer). If it's not working well, it's гнилой (literally, "rotten") or убитый (literally "killed"). If it's slow, it's задумчивый (literally, "thoughtful").

When life is going great, young people say it's балдёжно, зыко, неслабо, отпадно, улётно, файно, чётко, or чисто тайд. Here we can see the influence of English (файно is a Russified version of "fine") and the ad industry (чисто тайд -- pure Tide). English can also be found in several words for sex (факать, фачить) as well as a plethora of words for a young woman: гёрла, герлёнок, гёрлышка, гирлица. French is represented by the cheerful селява (accent on the second syllable) -- from c'est la vie. However, it has been corrupted -- perhaps due to the rhythmic echo of халява (freebie, something good attained free of charge) -- to mean "life," as in the phrase, Летом у нас была просто клёвая селява. (This summer life was just great.)

If a young person of your acquaintance says, Мы были в пожаре (literally, "we were in a fire"), you should get out your pamphlet on "How to Talk to Young People About Drugs"; it means "we got high." And if you hear him talking about Адам, бэтман, витамин Е, плейбой, слон, свинья, or экс (literally Adam, Batman, Vitamin E, playboy, elephant, pig or Ex) -- these are references to the drug Ecstasy.

Pay attention if your child or step-child talks about антиквариат, нафталин, шнурки or ботинки (literally antiques, mothballs, shoelaces or boots) -- that's you; these are all slang terms for parents. The witty шнурки завязаны -- my shoelaces are tied -- means "My parents aren't home." Шнурки в стакане (literally "the shoelaces are in the glass") or предки в пещере ("my ancestors are in the cave") both mean "my parents are at home."

If hearing this makes you feel like a dinosaur, Russian kids would agree. In their slang, динозавр is "an old fogy."