Tommi Uschanov's reference the other day to Wittgenstein's almost-invention-of-reality-TV (that isn't what Wittgenstein was talking about, but it's what I always think of in connection with it) reminded me of Eric Kraft's novel What a Piece of Work I Am. Trying to find out whether Kraft explicitly mentions Wittgenstein's idea (I think he does) I discovered this evidence that Kraft wrote a review of a book by my friend Ranjit Chatterjee. Small world.
Here are some other links worth knowing about: a blog from which you can download the songs from almost every cassette given away with the NME during the 1980s, and a very interesting article by David Frum about the Republican Party.
i would think that it means 'generic blog post' (because that's what it sounds like).
ReplyDeletea lot of russian technology words are directly borrowed.
You're probably right (I didn't know that about Russian technology words). But why anyone would want to find a generic blog post is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteYes, "Дженэрик блог пост" is indeed nothing but the Cyrillic for "Generic blog post".
ReplyDeleteI'm not fluent in Russian (in spite of being 1/4 Russian), but as far as I know, "generic" here means generic drugs, which are probably a relatively big thing in impoverished countries such as Russia and Ukraine. (They certainly are here in Finland.) Note that the corresponding entry on Russian Wikipedia is headed just "Дженерик" - and not "Генерический препарат", for instance - which would suggest that this is the most common term in the language for the thing. In fact it's probably a recent importation from English, considering that the "g" is pronounced "дж" and not "г".
The Wittgenstein holiday snap is going viral fast, it seems. It's on the cover of my translation of the Koder diaries too. And both my editor and I congratulated ourselves for coming up with such a rarely seen yet instantly appropriate photo. But that was last winter.
DR, 'cd player' will be spelled and pronounced, for example, nearly phonetically using an s-sound and letter (i don't have my keyboard set up to type it out right now), even though the whole phrase without 'cd' abbreviated will spell out 'compact disk' phonetically (which uses a k-sound) and grammatically, and use proper russian words to refer to the machinery for playing. (whereas, as far as i know, 'player' is not otherwise a word in borrowed circulation elsewhere in russian.) similarly with other things. it's funny.
ReplyDeleteincidentally, 'blog' sounds much more like a proper russian word than it does an english word, so they have that going for them. 'blogger' has a certain appropriate air to it too when you put a russian accent on it.
Congratulations on the translation! And, yes, it's a nice picture, and very appropriate for the Koder diaries (since he talks about being on a boat in them).
ReplyDeleteI got Дженэрик блог пост just by transliterating the English, so I'm glad I came so close to getting the actual Russian (for generic drugs) right. The wrong kind of 'e' in the middle, but not bad otherwise. It does seem likely that people are searching for drugs they can buy via blogs. Surely a risky business.