Saturday 30 August 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill
Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests


Mind your language

Mind your language

Wednesday, 5th September 2007

English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah.

English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah. The joke consists in pronouncing the cyrillic letters as if they were Roman. I was surprised to discover that the Germans fighting in Russia in the second world war made a joke on the same lines with the Russian for a barn (in which soldiers might well be billeted), calling it a capau (whereas the Russian would be transliterated saraj).

This I discovered from a new book on slang from the war called Fubar by Gordon L. Rottman (Osprey, £9.99). Unusually, in addition to two sections on British Commonwealth and American slang, he devotes 70 pages to German slang.

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