Cold and wet...

Not a very pleasant day at all. The dogs—particulaly Shiloh—keep asking to go out, and when I open the door, they immediately change their mind and decide to stay in. Only the pleasure of having me walk them is enough to budge them out the door.

The translation I'm working on (and am within 2,000 words of finishing, finally) is of an article written by an educator who is really into not having early primary school teachers impose preconceptions on kids. And at one point, he's chatting with another educator who, theoretically, shares a similar view, and they're discussing what happened as a result of playing a recording of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony—the "Leningrad"—for a classroom of first graders.

Writes my author:

About four years ago, I recall my complete astonishment when I learned that, on the subject of this Symphony, the children had drawn… German swastikas. I asked Sergey, "So how did the children get the idea that
this Symphony was about the German invasion and about war?"

At this point, Sergey's reply reads (in Russian)

Как же, как же?

Which is one of those phrases that, in my mind, can take on a number of meanings, although not being a native speaker, I can never really be sure which. My usual approach—which is to imagine someone saying it to me in person and then relying on my accumulated experience and intuition—failed to zero in on a single meaning. Some of the candidates I came up with were

What do you mean, how?

What about it?

Isn't it obvious?

Any of these probably fit from the contextual point of view, but to make sure, I fired off an email to Feht to solicit his opinion, and his reply, which I accept as authoritative, was equally innocuous:

How? How, indeed!

This article has been full of such trifles that have had me turning to Galina, emailing Feht, and doing a lot of Web research. For sure, one can say quite a lot in Russian with words that, on their own, really don't mean very much.

Apropos of which, I am reminded of something I read some time ago, a good (though indecent) illustration of the expressiveness of the Russian language that employed only a single root—based on an obscene word for the male member—and a collection of prefixes and suffixes. It is conventionally cast as a conversation between a two workers at a construction site, where one would presumably expect to hear rough language.

In Russian, the exchange is a mere fifteen words in length, and every word contains that obscene root. Heavily bowdlerized, it may be stated in English as follows:

First worker: Man! Have you lost your mind? Why'd you load so much stuff? Unload it out of here!

Second worker: What's the problem? No way! There's no need to unload it. It's well-loaded. Let's go!

If tomorrow's Routine Stuff™ doesn't get out of hand, I expect to be able to finish my first pass through the long-term stuff.

Meanwhile, I need to call it a day!