The New Yorker, September 15, 2003 P. 42

LETTER FROM MOSCOW about mat, a form of Russian underground slang, pervasive in the streets. It was formerly pervasive in the gulag and has roots that are centuries old and perhaps pagan... Kaadyr-ool Alekseyevich Bicheldi, State Duma deputy from Tuva, has become famous as the author of a bill to make Russian the official state language, which would outlaw mat. Once only spoken on the street and in prisons, mat has made its way in to opera, literature, the internet, pop songs. Unlike indecent terminology in most languages, mat is multilevelled, multifunctional, and extensively articulated––more a philosophy than a language. Dostoyevsky claimed that a Russian could express the entire range of his feelings with one word, which he dared not write. That word is khuy, a term for the male sexual organ, which along with pizda ("cunt"), and blyad' ("whore" or "bitch") and the verb ebat' ("to fuck"), are the cornerstones of mat, which derives from the Russian word for mother, as in yob tvuoy mat, meaning "fuck your mother." Unlike other languages, Russian obscenity is rooted entirely in sexuality. Defecation is not part of cursing, and the Russian word for "asshole" is too cumbersome for expressive purposes. Catherine the Great tried to censor the word blyad' and Gogol was censored for using a word that rhymed with pizda as an exclamation. Khuy comes from the word khvoya, which means "pine-needle," or something that pricks. A theory holds that these terms were once employed by pre-Christian fertility cults. Christianity turned this language of sexuality into a language of blasphemy. Yob tvoyu mat may come from pyos yob tvoyu mat, meaning "a dog fucked your mother," implying defilement by the devil and that the offspring is a son-of-a -bitch. Pushkin used mat in an early poem "Tsar Nikita and His Forty Daughters," which describes the loss of forty cunts... The relationship between mat and the working classes persists. A Soviet-era joke: everything is in order in a factory, but the Party commission is worried about the overuse of mat. When the commission visits again, the factory is falling short of its quotas because the workers had used obscene terms for all the mechanical equipment. Without mat, they could not communicate. .. A chic version of mat has always existed among the upper classes, but it's the lower-class mat that stands out... Mat is like the planet that is also a giant brain in Stanislav Lem's novel, "Solaris." It is a protean language in which archaic strata mix with modernity. Yob tvoyu mat' can mean "I don't believe it!" to "Fuck off." Mat is virtually inaccessible to foreigners studying Russian. It is too semantically capricious, too dependent on intonation. It is linguistic theatre and verbal performance art that exploits the flexible range of Russians suffixes and prefixes... In recent years, mat has acquired warmer tones. Soviet soldiers used it as they attacked the Nazis, but Russian hockey players also used it defeating the Canadians. ... Soviets worked on reforming their language and forbade mat, driving it underground. It began to appear in the novels of Solzhenitsyn. After the Soviet Union fell, readers were surprised to find that great Russian writers has used mat. Russia is divided over mat's future. Those who want it to stay are fewer, but they have money. .. Zhirinovsky, a proponent of mat described a scene in which President Putin used mat to tell general Zyuganov that "We don't fucking need a military base in Cuba!" Because Putin used mat, he won the argument. .. If mat becomes regular vocabulary, it may lose its intensity. Women now use it more and more. Teen-agers are using a gentler version now that enables them to discuss sexual activity.

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