My daughter uses “the latter and the former” correctly in casual conversations, and my students use apostrophe to denote the plural.

Putin said today that he started the war because he was bored. I expect an apology from everybody who kept repeating “NATO expansion” like an overheated parrot.

Even this they can’t get right. He said “dovboyob”. People whose languages have an impoverished swear vocabulary should not even try to understand all of the beautiful shades of meaning of the word “dovboyob”.

I respect Google Translate for this inspired translation:

Good for you, GT. A dovboyob is a dovboyob. Nobody translates whiskey, and it’s the same principle at work.

My friend and I arrived at the pre-Christmas dinner with identically wrapped gifts for each other from the same store. It’s a little, out-of-the-way store, not a chain or bog box, and we never discussed it with each other.

We went there on the same day and apparently said identical things to the shop owner.

“You don’t have an unhealthy attitude to food!” a friend said.

“Yes, I do,” I answered.

“No,” she said. “I’ve known you for years. I would have noticed.”

“I carry this picture with me on my phone,” I explained. “And I look at it often.”

“Oh,” she said.

And once again, the answer in the comments is overwhelmingly Israel.

Tremaine Carroll is a lifelong criminal and biological male. After California passed a law requiring inmates to be housed in prisons based on their “gender identity,” Carroll abruptly declared that he was a woman, and got himself transferred to a women’s prison. Last January, he was accused of raping two women there.

https://womensliberationfront.org/news/da-compelled-to-call-alleged-male-rapist-she/her

People who vote D, please understand that it’s not the messaging, it’s not the platform, and it’s not how you explain it. It’s this. It’s that you offer absolutely nothing other than this in every area of life.

On Duolingo, whenever a grandpa is mentioned, it’s always in the context of “grandpa and his husband.” What I don’t get is, if these grandpas are so gay, how did they become grandpas?

The person who made me write a long post about poetry in Russian that nobody else understands could at least leave a comment so that it’s less lonely.

Seriously, folks should be more considerate to posts and their feelings.

Dude, you want me to explain the difference between an orgasm and an attack of asthma. It’s impossible but I’ll try.

Read the following lines. Breathe them in, inhabit them, say them slowly out loud:

Словно тёмную воду, я пью помутившийся воздух.
Время вспахано плугом, и роза землёю была.
В медленном водовороте тяжёлые нежные розы,
Розы тяжесть и нежность в двойные венки заплела!

I mean, talking about orgasm. This is what “в медленном водовороте” is transmitting without remotely naming it. Just say it aloud: “В медленном водовороте тяжёлые нежные розы”. Right? People who don’t know a word of Russian break out in sweat when I recite it. Not a single time did anybody fail to figure out from recitation alone that it’s an erotic poem that has zero words of eroticism. It’s in the meter, in the way words are arranged. You’ll have to draw in breath to be able to say “в медленном водовороте”. So the poem has you gasping whether you want to or not. The poet is stepping out of the verse and making you do things in reality by the power of his craft. He’s been dead for going on a century and he still is present in our very breath.

Or this:

И море, и Гомер — всё движется любовью.
Кого же слушать мне? И вот Гомер молчит,
И море черное, витийствуя, шумит
И с тяжким грохотом подходит к изголовью.

If you can’t hear the sea waves crashing against the bedpost in the last verse, then I give up.

And now let’s look at the poem that cost Mandelshtam his life:

Его толстые пальцы, как черви, жирны,
А слова, как пудовые гири, верны,
Тараканьи смеются усища,
И сияют его голенища.

Primitive rhymes, shallow imagery, childish vocabulary. “Жирны-верны” is out there with “розы-морозы”. It’s an insult to poetry. “Усища” is child speak.

To remove the aftertaste from this bleh poem, one more quote from Mandelshtam’s real poetry:

Кто время целовал в измученное темя, —
С сыновьей нежностью потом
Он будет вспоминать, как спать ложилось время
В сугроб пшеничный за окном.

You can spend the rest of your life feeding on the beauty of these lines and still gasp for air, crushed by the weight of their meaning. I think about these lines often. They have changed the very fabric of who I am.