The Coalition of the Swilling

Стелла!

(There's probably something amiss with that, since I just grabbed it off a translation site. Hopefully John will stop by and enlighten us)

По-русски

Pronounced "nye kultoorni", I think.....it means "uncultured", and is rumored to make Russians turn green when directed at them.

Okay, color me uncultured, but I don't understand the reference to Streetcar. I never saw that play, it looked pretty boring. What does it have to do with Putin?

Uh, Jeff, I have practically zero Russian except for the alphabet but even I know that "По-русски" is not pronounced "nye kultoorni".

Dave, it took me a few seconds to puzzle out "Стелла", but GOOD ONE!

(Stanley Kowalski pose in 'wife-beater t' and black pants)

Yeah, I got it. I'm just slow puzzling out the Cyrillic.

Uh, Jeff, I have practically zero Russian except for the alphabet but even I know that "По-русски" is not pronounced "nye kultoorni".

Blame Babelfish; I copied the text from there; since I READ zero Russion, I just assumed that it matched.

But one of my intell sergeants (who in fact spoke Russian) taught me the "nye kultoorni", and the often unmentioned fact that Russian borrows heavily from foreign languages for new terms, throwing in extra consonants for that Slavic language effect, more so than other languages do*.

I used to have a set of playing cards with Russian phrases and their "pronunciations" on them, the sort of thing handed out during the Cold War in case we had to interrogate prisoners. The only one that I remember is "bomb", which was pronounced (according to the card) as "boom-bah".

And that's the level of my Russian language skills. German is much easier.

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*: Robert Heinlein once described Russian as a wonderful langugage for paranoid thoughts. This might provide some insight to Putin's thought processes.

The Heinlein comment is great.

For those who don't know it, "По-русски" is pronounced (roughly) "Po-rooskie" (shorter "oo" as in "wood"). It means "in Russian", as in "Do you speak in Russian?"

And except for a very few other random words that's pretty much the extent of my Russian, though I can recite the entire Cyrillic alphabet (and can even remember how to write some of the letters).

And now John will stop by to tell me my pronunciation sucks.

That's interesting, Ken, 'cuz I asked Babelfish to translate "uncultured" from English to Russian.

That teaches me not to trust Babelfish unless I speak the language, it does! I can make it work with German, but clearly not Rooski.

Funny that. I tried it (at babelfish.altavista.com, is that the one you used?) and got "uncultured" translated as "uncultured". That's odd. Looks like babelfish chokes on it.

Not to worry though. I tried "culture" and got "культура" which I would try to pronounce as (roughly) "kooltyoora". Sounds like it's probably right

Then I tried "not cultured" and got "выращено в питательноть среде" which I would try to pronounce as (I think) "birasheno i peetatelnot sredeh". That was nowhere near "nye kultoorni", so I fed it back through from Russian to English and got "it is grown in to pitatel'not' to the medium". I have absolutely no freakin' idea what that means so I will wait for John to come by and explain it all.

But the part you copied (По-русски)? That's the text that tells you what language is in the box. I suspect you'll get that a lot.

But the part you copied (По-русски)? That's the text that tells you what language is in the box. I suspect you'll get that a lot.

Oopsie! :-/

Kind of like how I discovered that in Germany, half the streets are named "Einbahn Strasse"

I still don't know the significance of the street car.

The street car is a phallic symbol that Marlon Brando used to catapult his way into Hollywood. Symbolically, THS assumes that Putin sees himself as an up-and-coming Marlon Brando, and is using Latvia as a substitute for Stella, so that he can sustain his faux outrage at being shut out in the rain.

That, and Marlon had some really cool pecs way back then. I'm amazed that The Sis hasn't plastered images of a nearly nude Brando here, the way she used to for that beachcombing pseudo-male Euroweenie Heckledork.

"Einbahn Strasse"......LOL! I knew a few troops who made the same mistake.

And I meant to say "Estonia", not "Latvia", during my Chomsky moment up there.

Really.

(Gah-RROWWLLLL.)

Oh, wait. Brando for Skylar's American icon lesson.

You know, it occurs to me that perhaps there's another Brando moment that could characterize Putin and the Russian juggerknothead:

"I coulda been a contenda. 'Stead of a bum, which is what I am."

For all you heathens out there, sorry I'm late to the thread, but nekulturnyi is:

некультурный

Most Russians don't give a rip if you call them this, but the intellectuals sure do. If you want to piss off a Russian, call them Блядь (blyat), which meant "c**t" or "whore", but is often used in suituations an American would say "f**k" or "you f**ker".

And Ken S. - that was a keyboard spittin' translation you got there. It ignored the "not", I think, because it says "grown in a nutrient medium" - i.e. "cultured" in the bacterial sense.

Jeff S. - Cyrillic should easy for you because you had to memorize all those Greek letters for your geek classes. The Russian "p" looks like "pi", the "r" is not a copy of our "p", it is a copy of the Greek "rho".

Oh yes:

кусай меня

is "bite me".