![]() ![]() Здорóвый (healthy) and здорóво (healthily) are the first meanings. (“That’s unthinkable without strong will and determination from the government.” “Oh, we’ve got that in spades.”)įinally, there is another word that can mean “Great!” but it all depends on where you put the stress when you say the word. ![]() In a translator’s chat someone asked about a conversation that concerned a possible solution to a social problem. In other contexts кудряво seems to have the sense of living or doing something great, terrific, super - but perhaps a little too good, a bit too fancy: Кудряво живёшь! (You’re living the high life!) Maybe that’s great maybe it’s time to cut back on the truffles. It’s not good for the thinker or the people around him: Лучше бы он не думал так кудряво (It would be better if he his thoughts didn’t wander all over the place). ![]() You can also think кудряво, which is when your mind goes in a million directions at once. In design or architecture, it generally means something that is overly intricate in an unpleasant way. Кудряво is not what you want someone to call your novel. In literary Russian, those swirls and curls are pretentious in writing - either as handwriting or as prose. The adverb кудряво is often used to describe curly clouds or puffs of smoke: Из-за крыш торчали в небо трубы завода и густо, кудряво дымили (From the roof tops the factory smokestacks thrust up into the sky and produced thick swirls of smoke). Кудрявый (adjective) means curly or swirling, as in what hair can be. This time the original meaning is not a beak or mouth but can refer to something a bit higher up on (some) creatures. I was recently introduced to another improbable synonym for хорошо. One suggestion is that it was originally fishing slang - хорошо клюющий, which I take to mean “the fish are biting.” I like that suggestion best because I can see how the notion of a great day at the fish pond could be generalized to “great day” to “great.” But who knows? Starting in the mid-1800s клёво was also found in dictionaries of criminal slang you can find it in Gorodin’s Gulag Dictionary, for example, where it means хорошо, красиво, удачно (good, beautiful, lucky).Įtymologists think it comes from the verb клевать (to bite or peck) and клёв (beak or a bite). I suppose traveling book peddlers might have spread slang as they traveled from town to town, but it seems unlikely that “distinguished” became the modern notion of “cool” or “great.” He wrote that it was part of офенское арго (bookseller slang) in the city of Vladimir and meant знатный (distinguished). The main problem with this version - other than failing to explain how “clever” morphed into “cool, stylish, fun, and special” - is that the word was first noted in a Russian dictionary in 1820 by a certain A.A. In this version клёвый чувак was a smart, talented, clever guy. The first explanation I found is that it is a Russified borrowing from the English word “clever” that appeared via Soviet hippies (хиппи) in the 1970s. So where does the word “клёво” come from? When things are good, you exclaim: Хорошо! When things are good and you are too young to legally drink you exclaim: Клёво! If you want, you can exclaim it when you’re old enough to drink or even get a pension - but the word does have a young vibe.
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