Literally

I think maybe my Englishness is starting to hold me back. On the way into work on Wednesday morning the bus didn’t have any of those buttons you press to request a stop, so everyone just pressed the button above the door which said ‘press to speak to driver in emergency’. If you think about it, that’s kind of logical. I mean the driver must have been used to it, and it’s a perfectly good system. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I’d get up and go to the door, and then read the words by the button and some sort of impulse would kick in and I’d find myself walking back to my seat. I must have repeated this awkward ritual at least three times, and probably looked like a complete weirdo, when someone else who wanted to get off at my stop barged past me and pressed the button. Phew.

And it’s not just on the bus. Once in the supermarket, I was waiting a respectful distance from the till while the person ahead of me unloaded their shopping onto the conveyor belt. There was a narrow corridor between the wall and the till next to me, so it seemed fairly obvious to me that I was queuing. Do you know what the verb ‘to queue’ is in Russian? There isn’t one. The closest you can get is ‘to wait in line’, and I think the implication there is that you’re being made to wait in line, rather than doing it of your own volition. So it should have come as no surprise to me when a huge babushka shoved me into the wall, squeezed past me, and placed her basket assertively on the edge of the till next to the conveyor belt. Well I guess now I know. Don’t try to queue.

But most of the time you simply don’t have the option of being English. If I go home at rush hour, I’m always pushed to the back of the bus by a tidal wave of people. Then when I need to get off, there’s no choice but to shoulder my way back past everyone until I get to the doors. And unlike in London, you don’t get angry looks when you do this, because everyone needs to do it eventually. And actually, as long as you’re prepared for this, it’s a much better system than awkwardly waiting behind people and muttering excuses until they notice you’re there and let you past, isn’t it?

But Aygul assures me that English culture has actually influenced Krasnoyarsk a lot. She pointed out that the Union Flag is quite popular on clothes and bags over here, and I even saw one guy wearing a Chelsea hat. And of course, the language has a fair amount of Anglicisms (and Americanisms) too. People say ‘respect’ quite a lot, in a Jack Black kind of way. If someone said they’d done a base jump, the response would probably be ‘respect’. One guy even tried explaining to me in Russian what the word ‘respect’ meant, and didn’t seem to understand when I told him we have it in English too. But my favourite Anglicism is when they shove the suffix ‘ble’ into a Russian word to make it like the English adjective ‘edible’. The verb ‘to watch’ is ‘smotret’, so a film which was alright but nothing special is ‘smotribelʹno’. The ‘ibel’ in the middle is meant to sound like the English ‘able’. I just love everything about that. That and ‘klassno’. Very strong.

It was also the first English Club on Wednesday evening. I didn’t really know what the brief was, so I decided to watch a Flight of the Conchords sketch and then a Tim Minchin song with them. I said that the theme was ‘stereotypes’, but I think I used the word ‘theme’ generously there. It was more of an open discussion with some comedy sketches thrown in. About twelve or fifteen people turned up, and it went surprisingly smoothly. At one point, I asked what stereotypes about England they knew. One guy mentioned that we say ‘literally’ a lot, even when we don’t literally mean literally. That caught me off guard a bit.

‘Uh yeah that’s true. That’s not a stereotype, that’s a fact’ I said. ‘Literally’.

The guy who asked the question leaned forwards, clearly intrigued.

‘Well then what do you say when you actually mean literally? Is there another word for this?’

…

I guess Englishness isn’t really that useful at all.