Alligator Waltz wrote:Так, дядя Паша, статьи мадам Березовенко нет? Очень хорошо! Объяснений, каким образом уголовник-рецидивист мог поехать на авторалли в Монако в 1974-м году, тоже нет? Великолепно!
Зоряна, я рада, что высказалась на доступном Вам уровне. Спасибо за понимание.
Девушка, умерьте свой пыл.
Что, залогиниться тяжело? Или денег жалко? Так там 2 недели бесплатно.
Специально для Вас:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1102 ... il,00.html
Goat Talk
By ANTONINA BEREZOVENKO
December 6, 2004
In June, Vice President Dick Cheney shocked the American public by using the F-word in the Senate. In Russia and Ukraine, where scatological and off-color terms have become the norm, Mr. Cheney wouldn't have raised an eyebrow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first to talk dirty. Consider his remark on Sept. 16, 1999: "We will pursue terrorists wherever necessary: if in the airports, then in the airports. I am sorry, but if we could catch them in rest rooms, then we will kill them even in there." More recently, Dmitri Rogozin, the leader of Russia's Rodina party, criticized another policy maker by saying that "he had drowned in a bedpan." And just this month, writer Vitaly Korotich suggested that Russia had "s -- t on itself" by trying to interfere in the elections in Abkhazia.
Such language is also evident in Ukraine. In a recent speech, Prime Minister and presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych referred to his opponents (approximately half of the population of Ukraine) as "goats." Mr. Yanukovych, who served two jail terms as a young man, knows that goats, in prison slang, are the passive partners in homosexual rapes. He also promised that he would take his opponents "by the balls."
The democratic opposition's candidate for president, Viktor Yushchenko, has suggested that the minister of the interior's "place is next to the toilets." In a similar vein, the former president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, has called specialists in dirty public relations "s -- t throwers." The head of the Ukrainian People's Party, Yuri Kostenko, has talked of "voting in the toilet." Yulia Tymoshenko, another opposition leader, when asked about her presidential chances, responded with 300 words of fecal metaphors focusing on the bowels, the colon, and constipation. Parliamentary deputy Volodymyr Cherniak accused his opponents of falling below "the city's sewer system."
* * *
So what's going on here? Such language would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. It was also exceedingly rare in the 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. Clearly, deep-seated cultural taboos about the body, sex, and sexuality are being broken, as befits two societies undergoing distressing political, social, and economic transitions from communism. And inasmuch as those taboos were expressed in language, their breakdown is also evident in a breakdown in traditional linguistic norms.
But both societies are also deeply polarized politically. Vladimir Putin's Russia is moving in an obviously authoritarian direction, as is (or, at least until this month's street protests against vote fraud, was) the regime of outgoing President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine. The stakes in both societies have been extremely high. Just as the authoritarians know that this is their last chance to hold on to power, so too the democrats understand that this is their last chance to resist their countries' full-scale transformation into authoritarian regimes. When the stakes are high, it is small wonder that the language is so low.
Most disturbing is the possibility that this turn to excremental language bespeaks an underlying awareness by all, publics and elites alike, in both Russia and Ukraine that their societies have sunk as low as they possibly can. When life looks hopeless, excremental metaphors may, alas, be fully accurate.
Ms. Berezovenko is adjunct associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University.
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