How the Witches' Hats Turn Into Street Buoys

This is about how phrases are borrowed and created.


Not long ago, someone observed that street construction sites here usually lack those pointy orange rubber things some English-speakers call "safety cones" or, as the Australians call them, "witches' hats."


The things actually do exist, although they are indeed rarely used and no Russians asked could recall their name.


There is a general term, predupreditel'niye ogorozhdeniye ("warning barriers"), that covers the gamut of obstacles local workers might pitch in front of an exposed manhole: a sign, a tire, a tree branch with a red pennant attached, or even those pointy orange rubber things.


However, there is no term that means "witches' hats" and "safety cones" that any Russian anywhere would understand without an inordinate amount of contextual prompting.


Oh, we tried. But shapka ved'my came out sounding like proper headwear at a coven, while konus bezopasnosti sounded like the best place to seek shelter in the event of a black hole.


Was it time to coin seifti kouns? After all, we work at a newspaper where Russian employees have adopted a number of other English terms.


People in resepshan connect incoming calls to reporters in the nyuz-rum by dialing the proper ekstenshyn; if no one's in, they take a messedzh. The guy in charge of supplies and maintenance is the offis-menedzher.


The local folks have adopted the russified English, and only partly to make it easier for non-Russians who don't know how to say upravlyayushchy khozyaistvennami delami ("office manager").


Most of these terms are necessitated by the absence of the thing they mean in Russian. Take nyuz-rum. Russian newspapers consist of a series of small offices united by corridors. There is no one place where all the reporters work together, and although komnata novostei is understandable to anyone who has seen a newsroom, there really is no such phrase in Russian.


At first glance, resepshan may seem redundant -- there is a Russian word, priyomnaya, for the place where the receptionist sits. But ours bristled at the suggestion that she worked in a priyomnaya, citing certain associations with the word that didn't sit well with her -- rude phone manner, ubiquitous tea kettle, portrait of Lenin.


Getting back to our cones, we decided that Russian already had enough borrowed words, and coined dorozhniye buiki, "street buoys."


Content with our choice, we set about the all-important linguistic task of ensuring the spread of our term into daily usage -- such as notifying Russky Yazyk Publishers that they could print dorozhniye buiki in their dictionary whenever they are ready to send us a nice, fat check.