Back when I was in high school, there was one thing that helped me get through studying particularly boring parts of the English grammar, and that was the unique expressions that seemed totally out of place to me. After I started writing these articles, I began noticing the same things in Russian. For one, I’ve already mentioned a couple of oddities in our colors article - and now, I just can’t help myself but do the same thing, disease-themed.
Quite a decent example of what I’m talking about is the verb болеть (bolet’), which generally translates as “to be ill”. Its other use has a completely different meaning: in Russian, rooting for some sports team or even being interested in one specific sport means that you “болеешь за” - are literally ill with it. For example, the word for a football fan is футбольный болельщик - roughly “someone footballishly diseased”. Don’t confuse it with “больной” - a regular "sick person".
A word that can completely change its meaning based on the context is чума (chuma). While its original translation is plague, you can also use it to say that something is incredibly, or even noxiously cool. You can also use it as an adjective: a чумовой album, for instance, is an album that totally rocks.
One expression that I find particularly graphic has to do with snot. If you’re watching a movie that’s just too melodramatic to your liking, you can say that it’s “сплошные сопли” (sploshnye sopli) - “nothing but snot”. Also, “жевать сопли” (jevat sopli), literally “to chew snot” means to endlessly whine about something.
Another flu symptom that’s become a popular expression is sneezing. Remember how you can use “symmetrical” (“симметрично”) to express your indifference? Well, if you want to be less scientific and more graphic about it, you can just say “начхать!” (“nachhat”) - “I sneeze on this”, meaning you totally don’t care.
As for the expression that I’ve used in the very beginning of this article, “зараза” (zaraza) is a simple swear word, meaning “disease” or “pestilence” - usually said in hot temper about something or someone that’s bugging you.
Well, that’s it for today. Stay healthy, and next time, we’ll take a look at the two basic swear words that are very important for the whole Russian culture!
