Post-Soviet Dating

Quickly!

English is an eclectic language: it steals liberally from other languages to add to its own. One of the more amusing pre-September 11 jokes was a reputed comment from President Bush to Prime Minster Tony Blair as an aside during tri-nation conferences with the French. While Chirac was waffling to the press, Bush leaned in to Blair and (reputatedly) “You know what the trouble with the French is? They don't have a word for ‘Enterpenteur’.”

Russian borrows heavily from other languages too (One of the words for a train station sounds roughly like “Vauxhall,” the British train terminal that Peter the Great’s engineers studied as a model for understand how to construct train service.), but surprisingly, there is little in the way of Russian that has flowed back into English.

One Russian term in contemporary language is “bistro” (бистро) which means, in Russian, “quickly.” Depending on whom you ask, it stems either from French soldiers in Moscow or Russian soldiers in Paris yelling to get to table service.

posted by Anonymous Jack @ 11:02 PM