From Jeffrey Golderg the Linguist (not Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist — Jeff the Tongue, not Jeff the Pen) on April 3, passing on a Facebook posting with an old Soviet joke, along with monitory commentary from On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder the Historian:
(News note: Snyder, his historian wife Marci Shore, and his philosophy colleague Jason Stanley are all leaving Yale to move to the University of Toronto in the fall)
I’ll comment here briefly on two things: old Soviet jokes, some of them now startlingly applicable to life in the Soviet States of America under President Putinitsa and her sidekick Evilon; and the naming convention in Jeffrey Goldberg the Journalist and Jeff the Tongue.
Old Soviet jokes, subversive jabs at life in the USSR and especially at the extraordinary oppressions of the Soviet state, especially through its secret police. As above and in this favorite joke of Jeff Goldberg’s:
A man is shouting in Red Square, “Brezhnev is an idiot, Brezhnev is an idiot!”. He is promptly arrested, and tried that day. He is sentenced to one day in jail and 20 years in El Salvador (oops, Siberia).
The one day is for spreading anti-Soviet Propaganda. The 20 years is for revealing state secrets.
From Wikipedia:
Russian political jokes are a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. In the Soviet period political jokes were a form of social protest, mocking and criticising leaders, the system and its ideology, myths and rites
There are, of course, on-line collections of these jokes.
Name (the) Noun. A naming format that distinguishes people with the same name (personal or family) via nouns alluding to their occupation, directly or indirectly:
Davy / Jones (the) Baker / Bread
The format is associated with Welsh naming in English (based on a pattern in Welsh), made especially notable through the character Dai Bread in poet Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices” Under Milk Wood. Dai is a nickname for the Welsh name Dafydd, exactly corresponding to Davy as a nickname for the English name David.
Meanwhile, David Jones is a gigantically common name for men in Wales and for men of Welsh extraction elsewhere. The University College of North Wales in Bangor once had four faculty named David Jones in its Welsh language and linguistics program; one was called David Owen Jones, one Davy Jones, and I don’t remember the other two — hey, this is from 1972, give me a break.
(In case you need to distinguish me from my father, also named Arnold Zwicky: Zot — my college nickname — could be Arnold the Tongue and Zip — his college nickname — could be Arnold the Health; he ended his working life in his dream job, as a public health officer in central California.)
Leave a Reply