Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 12 -- Kseniya Turkova, who tracks language change
in Russia for the Snob portal, says that Donald Trump’s election is leading to
the spread of “Trumpocalypse” and other “Trumpisms” in the Russian language and
that these provide a rich field of study of linguists like herself.
She says she heard her first Russian
Trumpism in a Moscow café the day after Trump won the election in the US. One
Russian said to another, she reports, that he “’had no strength left and had
been trumped for the day.’” But almost immediately after that, she heard dozens
of neologisms based on his name (snob.ru/selected/entry/116376).
Trump’s
name and its translation into Russia where it means “a winning card” encourages
this process, Turkova says, as does the fact that be changing only the letter “m”
trump becomes not a winning card but a trap. Among the most common Trumpisms so
far are “Trumpocalypse,” “Trumpomania,” and “Trumpanic.”
Some
Russians, picking up on a linguistic innovation offered by filmmaker Michael
Moore in September, have also begun referring to the United States as “Trumpland,”
the Snob portal journalist reports.
The
Russians are far from alone in doing this, she continues. The French are using
their own expression “se tromper,” to suggest that the US has made a
mistake. And the Ukrainians are corrupting
their verb, “trapitis’,” to read “traMpilos’.”
The question then in Kyiv, “what’s happened?” takes on a whole new
meaning.
Both
supporters and opponents of Trump are engaged in this creative work, Turkova
says, an indication that “the world really is on the brink of changes, that it
is becoming unpredictable, that analysts have been wrong in their predictions,
and that the accepted arrangements have collapsed.”
As
a result, she says, “not only the figure but even the family name Trump has
become a marker of these changes. But we still do not know what the post-Trumpanic arrangement of the world
will be.”
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