From hearsay

Block has these lines:

Accidentally on a pocket knife
Find a speck of dust from distant lands
-And the world will appear strange again,
Wrapped in a colored fog!

This feeling is well known not only to poets, but also to researchers. You accidentally catch on to a fact (in our science it’s usually some kind of example) - and suddenly everything will sparkle with new colors, and the most ordinary thing will turn out to be mysterious. For example:

- Time goes by quickly, and yet it’s so boring here! - she said without looking at him.

“It’s just common to say that it’s boring here.” The average person lives somewhere in Belev or Zhizdra - and he is not bored, but will come here: “Oh, boring! oh, dust! You'd think he came from Grenada.

(A.P. Chekhov, Lady with a Dog).

At first glance, there is nothing special, and the word ah here is quite ordinary. However, it is interesting that outside the context of retelling, ah cannot be used in such a phrase. The following dialogue is not possible:

-Did you have a good trip?-
*Oh, boring! ah, dust!

The interjection ah in its basic meaning corresponds to a certain part of the emotional spectrum (remember Tsvetaev’s “Ah” when it’s wonderful). But in our case, restrictions on the type of emotion are, if not removed, then at least weakened. Ah in “our” meaning can be intoned in two ways. Or it is adjacent to the next word (ah boring, ahpyyl. This is how the famous reader Dmitry Zhuravlev intones this Chekhov phrase), while the word is stretched and pronounced with a gentle rise in tone followed by a fall. Or ah is pronounced separately, then the rise in tone is done on it, and the fall on the next word (this is how another performer of “Lady with a Dog” pronounces, Igor Yasulovich).

The mere presence in a language of markers of foreign speech (so-called xenoindicators) is not news. In many languages, the meaning of evidence is expressed using a grammatical category (mood or similar). In relation to the Russian language, the particles mole, say, de, and also supposedly grit (gyt) are usually mentioned in this regard. Etymologically they are mainly related to speaking verbs. However, it turns out that the repertoire of such means in the Russian language is much wider. For example, the use of the word here as a xenometric indicator is also extremely frequent in oral speech, although it is very poorly recorded in written speech. This is also completely understandable: after all, to realize this meaning, a special intonation design is necessary:

And she sits and whines: “Wow, I’m so unhappy...”; He boasted: “Wow, I’m the coolest”; She got attached: “Wow, aren’t you ashamed of what kind of skirt you have”; And he keeps promising: “Here, the money will come any day now, I’ll give it all away”; So what if she called first? And you would tell her: “Well, I was going to call you myself and congratulate you.”

So, and ah, and here are used as if as an opening quotation mark, marking the beginning of someone else's speech. At the same time, unlike more detailed particles like say, these two units do not imply that they will be followed by a detailed presentation or, even more so, an accurate reproduction of someone else’s speech. Both of them usually introduce an abbreviated retelling, but here is more likely to convey one or more of the most important remarks, and ah rather conveys the general meaning of the speech and its emotional mood. At the same time , ah usually implies that the person whose speech is being conveyed expressed some kind of assessment or was emotional - perhaps excessively.

In a retelling, someone else's speech often appears as if rhythmic, pronounced with a periodic rise and subsequent fall of tone on stressed syllables (this is somewhat reminiscent of enumerative intonation). At the same time, retelling is characterized by the fragmentation of someone else’s speech into smaller segments than is natural for ordinary speech, even into individual words:

- And what did he answer?
What an answer! “/\Maama doesn’t /\shaet.”

The intonation of the retelling distorts the original phrase so much that the listener immediately understands that these are not the speaker’s own words. For example, in the question What is your name? raising the tone of a name is impossible in a literary language. And in the quote (And he says to me: “/\De-evushka, how are you/\vuut?”) it is natural.

Someone else's speech can be transmitted not through actual retelling, but through imitation. There are special speech substitutes - meaningless combinations, usually containing repetitions and rhymes, which often implement the same or similar intonation contour. These are combinations like la-la poplar, la-la-fa-fa, te-te-te, te-te-ne-ne, teto-it, tyry-pyry and tyr-pyr eight holes, as well as a fairly new borrowing of the drone -blah(-blah): I explain to him: “I have a lot of work, and tomorrow my mother-in-law is coming, te-te-ne-ne <la-la poplars>...”; You say that you treat him well, but only as a friend, blah blah blah. Here are some more characteristic phrases: He comes running: “Ah! ABOUT!" How can I help him?; She came at me again: “Ah! Yeah!” Fed up already. All this is practically not reflected in written texts, but is often used in oral speech, especially if before that there was already some hint of the content of someone else’s words and the continuation is more or less clear.

In general, you just have to notice some “speck of dust,” for example, an interesting use of the word ah, and it all begins. You get down on the subway, and it seems that all people do is retell who said what to whom, imitate each other, and everything is just according to science, with the correct intonation contours. You turn on the TV, and there too - they quote, re-sing, and, moreover, with all the necessary markers. Just take it and write it down. In a word, a continuous colored fog.