In the 1970s Soviet animation studios produced a whole bunch of cartoons that you cannot watch without being stoned.  Seriously, without some serious pot, a normal human being’s only reaction would be a very loud “WTF!”

One of my favorite cartoons of that time was called “Plastiline Crow” (plastiline is a type of soft modeling clay).  This cartoon had a catchy song that was essentially a weird parody of Aasop’s  fable about a fox and a crow.  I play this song for my 10-month-old daughter and she seems to love it. 

So, I decided to give it a shot and translate the song into English. 





Warning:  Have at least a double-shot of vodka before reading…

For the last six or seven years I have been working on two projects in parallel – researching my grandfather’s life and compiling an extensive dictionary of Russian prison/criminal slang.  The two projects are actually related.  My grandfather spent 11 years in Soviet GULAG as a political prisoner.  But that’s a whole separate story.  When I began researching his life, I came across a number of prisoner testimonials and biographies that included some rather colorful slang.
One of my obsessions in life is languages and linguistics.  Many of the documents that I encountered contained words and expressions that I did not know and could not find much information on their meanings and etymologies.  So, being the geek that I am, I built a quick and dirty database application and began collecting Russian prison slang.

Unfortunately, at the time when I began this project, my idea of quick and dirty software development involved using Microsoft Access as my database.  Since switching to Mac three years ago, many of my projects kind of fell off my radar because I hate booting into Windows just to add an entry to a database.

For the past few years I’ve been keeping my dictionary in a Word document, but recently I began rewriting the dictionary application in PHP and MySQL and will be publishing it in the next few months.

The reason I actually started this blog entry is because while researching a “new” word, I came across and interesting fact that I have never heard before.

Apparently, a large portion of criminal/prison slang came into Russian language from Hebrew and Yiddish.  As it turns out, in certain places of Russian Empire where Jewish populations were extremely concentrated because of the Pale of Settlement Jewish criminal organization spoke exclusively in either Yiddish or Hebrew to prevent the police from understanding what was being said.  Since Russian Jews were prohibited from serving in the police, so it was a great way of keeping secrets.  As some of these Jewish criminals were arrested and sent to prisons or into exile, non-Jewish criminals saw the advantages of adapting their slang.  With time, Jewish criminal jargon became a part of mainstream Russian prison slang.

Pretty damn cool!