Watching My Language

A Beginner's Guide to Russian Cursing

I forget where, but I once heard it said, “Never make fun of someone with a foreign accent. They speak at least one more language than you do.”

True. I took French in high school from Monsieur Kubea and after two years, like most red-blooded American kids, I decided it would be easier for me if the French buckled down and learned English instead. I had other shit to do.

But that French class did pay off in an unanticipated way. For many years, in my stand-up act I did a joke about learning French from records. The records contained short French dialogues cued by a beeping sound: “Écoute et répete`: Ou es Slyvie (Beep) Au lycée (Beep)”

The punchline was…

“I’ve never been to France.

Do they really beep like that over there?

Maybe they just do it when they’re backing up.”

Thank you, Monsieur Kubea.

“Ou es la bibliothéque?” was another common phrase on those records and probably explains why in Paris the libraries are packed with Americans bumping into each other just trying to find Sylvie. Have you checked the school?

Shelley speaks a little French, a little Spanish, and a lot of Italian. The summer after college graduation, she took a crash course in Italian before setting out for Florence for nine months where she - through total immersion - became fluent. Through a friend, she got a job interview at a wool factory. It was a courtesy. They really had nothing for her to do. They asked her if she had any special skills. She told them she spoke English. They told her that there was nothing special about that. Everybody spoke English. Ultimately, they decided she could help them translate idiomatic expressions and slang written in telexes from America.

She got a job translating English into English.

“What does this mean when they say they went ‘belly up?’”

The only serious world traveling I’ve ever done has been for work. Which is how I found myself in Moscow in the summer of 2013. That was the same summer a young Edward Snowden was holed up in Sheremetyevo Airport for over a month after eluding American authorities who were upset at him for blowing the whistle on how U.S. government intelligence agencies were spying on their own citizens. Us. Remind me again, who “won” the Cold War?

You might recall, Snowden got in trouble for introducing us to a very bad word:

I was there for an entirely different reason. I was working in a comedy writers’ room in Moscow, helping a small group of Russian writers break[*] original stories for the Russian version of Everybody Loves Raymond. In Russia, it was called The Voronins, which is the name of the family. I was part of the American staff that had produced 210 episodes of Raymond over nine years. In Russia, they’ve translated and adapted all but about ten of our original episodes and have produced a shit-ton (translation: “a lot”) more. Their 552 episodes put it in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest running adapted television show in history.[†]

And this is not the first or only American show that has been exported to what used to be and once again is (sorry China, you’ll have to wait) our mortal enemy. We’ve also launched Married With Children, The Nanny, and a host of other American missiles of mirth. 

Landing in Moscow, I realized I had never been to a city where I could not read the signs on the streets and buildings. The year before, I spent five weeks in Israel, but most everybody there spoke English. In fact, the Israeli cab drivers spoke more comprehensible English than most New York cab drivers. Of course, I would never make fun of those cab drivers, knowing that they speak one more language than I do. Except for the ones from Long Island.

In Tel Aviv, all the signs are in Hebrew, Arabic and English. In Moscow, with the exception of the occasional Pepsi, KFC or huge glowing Hitachi sign looming over a statue of Lenin (who must be spinning in his hermetically sealed case over that), it’s the Cyrillic alphabet.

I would read what looked like an “O” that all of a sudden was followed by a backwards “N.” I’d spot a “C,” adjacent to a pitchfork of some sort. What’s that “3” doing in the middle of a word next to something that looks like either a baby grand piano or a bong sitting on a coffee table?

I did, however, hear a lot of Western pop music. It was a strange sensation driving back and forth from the studio every day. My driver, Stas, would play an English language radio station, while I gazed out the window unable to comprehend a damn thing. Inside that aural environment, I understood everything, Carly Rae Jepson was singing, “…Hey, I just met you. And this is crazy. But here’s my number, call me maybe….” But outside, the visuals had me halfway between dyslexia and a stroke. 

So as not to feel so helplessly illiterate, I studied the sounds of the Russian alphabet. I wanted to at least be able to decipher some of these words surrounding me every day. At a red light on my way to work, I’d point to a word and try out my pronunciation on Stas. I’d look for short words, because if it was a long word, I wouldn’t be able to sound the whole thing out before the light turned green. I felt like I was back in first grade, where every morning before the fat yellow school bus lumbered around the corner, my mom, would take me through my Fun With Phonics book.  

And I tried to learn to roll my “r”s, but that doesn’t come easily for a kid who grew up in the Midwest, where we pronounce our “r”s like a Barbary Pirate stubbing his toe, “arrrrgh.” “Dad, I’m going to play in the backyarrrrghd.”

The “R”s there are backwards anyway and sound like “ya.”  And the thing that looks like a lower case “r” in English is actually the sound for a hard “g.” 

It didn’t make it any easier that there are four letters that sound the same in both languages, the “T,” the “O,” the “M,” and the “A.”  It just made it more confusing, because the “B” is a “V”, the “P” is an “R,” the “C” is an “S,” the “H” is an “N,” the “y” is an “ooh”, and the “X” is a “kha.” 

It’s no wonder we can never seem to get along.

You say “ooh.”

I say “ya.”

You say “stop.”

And I say “kha-kha… kha!”[‡]

I felt like I was putting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle. I knew I wouldn’t get even close to finishing by the time I left, but I did pick out some of the edge pieces, common words like “rent,” (аренда) “flowers,” (цветы) “bank,” (банк) “24 hours,” (24 часa) “pharmacy” (аптека).  And of course, the universally ubiquitous Cтарбакс  … “Starbucks.”

But I hope Ed Snowden didn’t make the classic “PECTOPAH” mistake. I did my first day. “PECTOPAH” is Russian for “restaurant.” I saw the word all over the place. It’s one of the few words that looks entirely English. P-E-C-T-O-P-A-H. I wanted to show off for my new Russian boss, Artiom.

Me

I’ve been working on the language. I already know “Pectopah.”

Artiom

What’s Pectopah?

Me

You know… restaurant.

(Off his confused look)

How do you pronounce it?

Artiom

Restaurant.

Me

Ahhh…

Many Russian words like “restaurant” have French roots because back in the day the Russian aristocrats spoke French. All the kings and queens of Europe and Russia were often related to each other. It’s probably why in that same spirit before every meal, my new Russian friends would say “bon appetite.” And sure enough, sounding out words on storefronts I became attuned to the French … stew-dee-o… “Oh! Studio!” Suh-lon… “Salon!”

Beep! Voila!

Fortunately, I didn’t need to be “hooked on phonics” to understand my Russian colleagues. I had a first-rate translator, a young man in his late twenties named Ivan.[§] Ivan would sit at the conference table in the writer’s room translating my English into Russian and their Russian into English while simultaneously playing a video game on his tablet. I don’t know how he did it. There had to be some left-brain/right-brain gymnastics going on there like a ventriloquist throwing his voice while drinking a glass of water.

I quickly learned to “chunk,” my speech, that is speak only three or four sentences at a time, then stop and wait for Ivan to translate. This gave me time to formulate what I’d say next, as opposed to how I usually pontificate by hacking my way through a jungle of thoughts full of run-on sentences, reiterations, false starts, back-ups, and loop-de-loops. It allowed me the time to speak in complete, more coherent sentences unburdened by a knapsack full of “you knows,” “I means,” “kindas,” and “sortas.”

Thinking before speaking… hmmm…

Don’t worry, I got over it.

Eventually, I did pick up some Russian words. “Spaseba” means “thank you,” which if you’re going to learn only one word of a foreign language, that to me is the most useful.[**] In the writer’s room, I naturally picked up the word for “funny” (Smeshno) and the word for “joke” (Shootka). But, before I even learned those words, I asked what I am sure every American ambassador who arrives in a foreign country not knowing the language (because they got the job as a “spaseba” for giving a lot of money to the President’s campaign) asks:   

“Hey, how do you guys swear over here?”

Ivan and my fellow Russian comedy writers were more than happy to break it down for me.

My observations on this topic are in no way comprehensive. I don’t pretend I can delve deeply into the entire catalogue of Russian curse words or what I am sure is its complex grammar, syntax, and dulcet melody. I received merely a beginner’s guide to Russian cursing. When I asked Ivan the Russian equivalent of “fuck,” he explained to me that Russian cursing does not operate on a what he termed a “fuck-based” system. Whereas English speakers prefer variations of the verb fuck as in “fuck you,” “go fuck yourself,” then bending it into nouns, (“motherfucker,” “fuckhead”) adjectives, (“fucking this,” “fucking that,”) and even using it as a word extension as in “I guaran-fucking-tee you,” the cornerstone of Russian cursing is…  “cock.”

Russian swearing is a “cock-based” system.

For instance, in English one might say, “fuck you.” In Russian, one would say (phonetically) “Pashol na hui,” which literally means “go to cock.” In this case, no particular cock is specified. My understanding is that it is customary for one to go to the nearest available cock.

The closest we have to that is less a specific locution and more of a gesture, particularly native to the New York metro area, where one places one’s hand over one’s crotch, squeezes said crotch and utters the phrase, “Right here, pal.”

The Russian equivalent of our C-word for female genitalia[††] is also widely used in the same manner. However, I was also told that there is no literal equivalent for the ever popular and versatile “asshole.” Apparently, in Russia the anus is one part of the human anatomy not the source of giggling embarrassment and/or road rage found Stateside.

It’s in those fits of road rage where we Americans do our best work. It makes sense. Ever since the Model-T, we are the OGs of car culture and therefore on the cutting edge of cursing at any speed. The automobile is our profane sanctum sanctorum of sacrilege, a veritable language laboratory of lewdness.

Our friend, Gabrielle, who is not only one of the sweetest people we know but also the daughter of a preacher man, admitted she could spew some choice invective from her driver’s seat. When her first-born, Jacob, was a toddler she realized that she might be setting a bad example and resolved to tone it down in front of him. One day, driving down a Los Angeles freeway another car cut her off. She was incensed but caught herself in time to say, “Hey! You… bucko!”

From his car-seat in back, young Jacob asked, “Mommy, what’s a bucko?”

Gabrielle explained, “Well, Mommy was just mad at that man who cut us off, so I called him a ‘bucko.’”

And Jacob said, “Is that the same as ‘asshole?’”

I’d read somewhere that Mark Twain’s wife got fed up with his constant swearing, so one day to finally show him how vulgar he sounded, she recited to him a long list of all the curse words he used.

Twain reportedly replied, “You’ve got the words down, my dear, but the music is lacking.”

My dad, Clarence Skrovan, was a master at delivering the word “asshole.” I don’t recall him ever yelling it or even saying it in anger. The beauty was how he tossed it off. He threw it away, under his breath, letting it sneak out the side of his mouth. Like a jazz riff, a minor note played on a trumpet. “Asshole.” He was the Miles Davis of that particular epithet. He didn’t shove it in your face. He was merely stating a fact, which made it all the more devastating. And disarming at the same time. It was hard not to laugh and then ultimately agree with him that you were in fact an “ass… hole.”

That probably wouldn’t play in Russia where “pashol na hui” is king. According to Ivan, the fundamental expression, “hui,” also covers things that are “cock-like.” If you didn’t enjoy a movie, you might say, “That movie was “huinya.” It also covers something that is insignificant or “almost nothing” as in “His cock was huinya.”

Language is a window into culture. I’ve been told that in the German language, they frequently put the verb, the action word, at the end of the sentence. That always struck me as kind of sneaky. In my mind, a typical German sentence could be “September, soldiers, Poland, border… ATTACK!

I wonder what it says about our cultures that the essential building block of American cursing is a verb while for the Russians, it’s a noun. Maybe it represents the classic stand-off between an irresistible force versus an immovable object. Or more likely, I’m just talking out of my asshole.

Despite our distinct approaches to cursing, I came away thinking we’re not so different, Russia and America. They’ve got oligarchs. We’ve got oligarchs. We just have a different word for them –

Their leaders seek world hegemony. Our leaders seek world hegemony. We just call it:

Up until recently, if you asked the average American “Ou es Ukraine?” they’d probably reply “Je ne sais pas.” English translation: “How the fuck would I know?”

Beep.

After two pleasant summer months in Russia, I went home. It’s been ten years and counting for Ed Snowden. I wonder how he’s doing with the language. For a taste of home, does he get his coffee at Cтарбакс? To many in my country, the word for him is “villain.” My word is:

Therefore, I, unlike the national security establishment in Washington, wish him the best of luck.

And I hope one day he gets to come home and tell all those who wished him ill to… “go to cock, buckos!”

Max and Anna in Russian writer’s room.

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[*] That’s TV writers room language for “come up with.”

[†] See ELR’s creator Phil Rosenthal’s documentary, Exporting Raymond.

1h 26m | PG

[‡] To the tune of the Beatles’ “Hello/Goodbye.”

[§] Pronounced “ee-VAHN.”

[**] Whatever word means “sorry” is another good one to learn. In Russian it’s “izvini.”

[††] C-word. Yes, that’s where I draw the line.