Russian Blog

For some reason whenever I’m searching for some interesting piece of news from the Великая Родина [Great Motherland] to comment on here, there’s nothing even remotely interesting to be found on any of the many abundant Russian news sites. I’m not just trying to find a news story to comment on in a purely ‘journalistic’ way, no, my goal is more of a linguistic one – the articles have to contain at least one good sentence from a Russian grammatical point of view. Just like in most countries today, Russian journalists aren’t always that concerned with remarkable grammar or skilled stylistics, but prefer to write simple, dry sentences without any of that juicy use of cases or imperfect/perfect verbs or impersonal constructions. While surfing Комсомальская Правда [which has an amazing website on which you can choose your city or region, and after that get almost nothing but local news – but if you don’t have an uncle living in Penza or friends in Ulan-Ude, you should pick the capitol… if you think you can handle all the gossip about Russian stars that cover the pages of the weekly paper] I came across this headline: Гомосексуалистов Содома и Гоморры убило астероидом? [Were the homosexuals of Sodom and Gomorra killed by an asteroid?] Of course the article, though perhaps worth a quick glance nevertheless, is, as the Russians would say, полная чушь [complete nonsense], but the construction used in the headline with the perfect verb убить [to kill] combined with the instrumental case, чем, did catch my attention. The sentence in the headline is of my personal favorite kind – the impersonal kind. In such constructions the verb is written in third person singular, in every tempus, making the past form of it «убило астероидом» [killed by an asteroid]. In such a simple way the sentence above conveys that the death was accidental and not the fault of the people killed (i.e. in this case that the ‘homosexuals’ of the Old Testament weren’t actually punished by God, but suffered death because of foreign objects coming from space). You can of course use other ‘reasons of death’ like for example, «убило молнией» [killed by lightning] or «убило чумой» [killed by the plague].

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