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Russian is more productive than English, so there’s a bunch of “we just smushed a bunch of prefixes and suffixes on it” words that don’t have a great English equivalent, like недоперепить – to drink quite a lot but not succeed at drinking too much. I don’t think we properly have листопад which is the equivalent of “snowfall” but for autumn leaves. I really miss успевать – to successfully have enough time to do something. There’s also кипяток – water that has been boiled but then slightly cooled, like 200-205 degrees F. The canonical examples are тоска , which is a kind of melancholy longing, and авось which expresses optimism but I basically never heard anyone actually say.
I think авось has a general meaning similar to “god willing”, or “with some luck”, not simply some optimism. Like “авось успеем” -> “with some luck, we can make it in time”. I do agree it’s an old-fashioned word which I haven’t really heard in a while.
As someone who speaks the exact bare minimum amount of Russian to get by in Estonia (so basically hello, please, thank you, fuck you, good bye), there’s a couple Russian words of the “not in front of your babushka” type that IMO lose a bit of character when translated to the English phrases that mean the same thing:
похуй - universal answer whenever someone raises a concern
In the context of how I hear it used in Estonia at least, it both means something is very annoying, or it means it’s so unimportant it doesn’t matter. It also just means “thingamajig”. I suspect there are use cases I can’t think of right now or ones that I don’t even know.
Russian is more productive than English, so there’s a bunch of “we just smushed a bunch of prefixes and suffixes on it” words that don’t have a great English equivalent, like недоперепить – to drink quite a lot but not succeed at drinking too much. I don’t think we properly have листопад which is the equivalent of “snowfall” but for autumn leaves. I really miss успевать – to successfully have enough time to do something. There’s also кипяток – water that has been boiled but then slightly cooled, like 200-205 degrees F. The canonical examples are тоска , which is a kind of melancholy longing, and авось which expresses optimism but I basically never heard anyone actually say.
Never hearing anyone express optimism feels like a very Russian stereotype.
It does seem on-brand.
I think авось has a general meaning similar to “god willing”, or “with some luck”, not simply some optimism. Like “авось успеем” -> “with some luck, we can make it in time”. I do agree it’s an old-fashioned word which I haven’t really heard in a while.
As someone who speaks the exact bare minimum amount of Russian to get by in Estonia (so basically hello, please, thank you, fuck you, good bye), there’s a couple Russian words of the “not in front of your babushka” type that IMO lose a bit of character when translated to the English phrases that mean the same thing:
похуй - universal answer whenever someone raises a concern
хуйня - very versatile word
I’ll let you do the honor of translating them.
So, pretty much anything and sometimes exact opposite thing 🥲
Pretty much.
In the context of how I hear it used in Estonia at least, it both means something is very annoying, or it means it’s so unimportant it doesn’t matter. It also just means “thingamajig”. I suspect there are use cases I can’t think of right now or ones that I don’t even know.