From what rubbish

What’s nice about my science (linguistics) is that you can collect material or sharpen your tools without interrupting your everyday life - of course, if you keep your ears open. Of course, both a physicist and an astrobotanist can think on a trolleybus, but not everyone is so lucky to be “in the field”, sitting in front of the TV or standing in line. This, of course, especially applies to those who live in the country of the language being studied. But even if you are a specialist, for example, in Sanskrit, it is still useful to think about Russian: the language mechanisms are the same everywhere. And in general, any observation will come in handy sooner or later.

So here it is. I'm sitting here in my daughter's music lesson. And I listen with interest as my beloved teacher says to her: “Now I’ll put a lantern for you.” And further: “Play from the lantern.” Of course, it was not about the fact that he was going to give the child a blank check under his eye. The lantern is a round, cross-shaped icon that indicates a gap in the text: play until the lantern, then don’t play, and play from the lantern again.

And then I had an epiphany.

I thought that, probably, the popular expressions from the lantern (All the numbers were written from the lantern) and to the lantern (And he doesn’t care about the lantern) came from the jargon of the labukhs. In general, he greatly enriched the language. The fact is that the profession of a musician is very complex, requiring long training, special knowledge and professional terminology. At the same time, let’s say, the techniques of playing the violin have remained almost unchanged for centuries. Words are passed down from generation to generation. In addition, this is a very popular profession (if you take not the elite layer of musicians, but those same labukhs who play in restaurants, at weddings and funerals). Let us note that labukhi do not work somewhere in workshops and laboratories, but in the very thick of people’s life, and their professional jargon is well known. On the other hand, restaurant musicians often come into close contact with the criminal environment, and their jargon is mixed with thieves' jargon. Finally, it is worth noting that this language includes not only a large amount of foreign, mainly Italian terminology, but also Jewish elements - after all, there were traditionally many Jews among the musicians.

Of course, there is a lot in this jargon that never goes beyond its scope, simply because it is incomprehensible to the uninitiated, and even if it is understandable, it is not funny. For example, expressions such as in C major (naked), full bekar (failure), ligate (appropriate), syncopate (lame person). With C major it is clear, this is the simplest key - major and without signs at the key. Hence the idea of ​​nudity. Bekar is a sign that cancels sharp or flat, i.e. The idea of ​​“nothing” is expressed here. Hence the association with failure. Although it would be understandable if failure was also called flat, because this is a sign of lowering by a semitone. But flat in this jargon has a different meaning - belly (the icon is really “pot-bellied”). To tie together means to connect, to play notes together, hence the new meaning. It was as if he had taken someone else’s property along with his own. Well, the syncopation is also clear. But all this is purely workshop. As, for example, the extremely expressive labab zhmur (play at a funeral).

But the expression, quietly, has long been included even in the literary language. A mute is a device that changes the sound of a musical instrument. For strings, this is something like a comb or clip, with which the instrument sounds muffled. Hence the figurative meaning - quietly. But as for the jargon, I can’t say that, I haven’t conducted independent research, and in general the origin of such units is usually a murky matter, but it is believed that it was from the language of the Labukhs (at least through it, and then through the jargon of the Stilyags) that they came not only such little-known words outside of slang as berlyat (eat) and kachumat (be silent), but also the familiar crap (He who doesn’t crap doesn’t screw up), hiljat (go), dude (doesn’t need translation) and many others . I remember the formulation popularized by Aksyonov: The dude swore at the code (about the death of Stalin). In general, the expression to heal on the code in the literal (to go to the code) and figurative (to die) sense is very characteristic. Firstly, it combines a purely slang word and a musical term, and secondly, it shows that this language is adapted to describe both music and life.

Against such a background, from lantern to lantern it looks very organic. Well, a light bulb can appear in place of a lantern (I don’t care about a light bulb) under the influence of a typical phraseology mechanism for replacing elements based on semantic or phonetic proximity: roll a barrel - roll a cylinder at someone; then the option to crumble the loaf for someone else appears, with its own option to crumble the bun. And it’s already difficult to see anything in common in the expressions roll a barrel and crumble a bun.

Indulging in these fascinating thoughts, I got home and began to see what they were saying about the origin of expressions from lantern to lantern. It turned out that there is a version that they are connected with lamplighters, who walked from lantern to lantern and lit them - or, accordingly, extinguished them. Well, I don’t know, I think it’s a fantasy.

Another version was discovered - which, however, was expected: in phraseology everything is like in psychoanalysis. Almost any expression can be derived from something clear. So, there is a theory that the expressions before the lantern, before the light bulb, from the lantern come from the language of miners. In the old days, they used for lighting not a battery-powered headlamp, but something like a candlestick surrounded by a special protective grille, which they wore on their belts. Accordingly, the lighting device was in close proximity to the causal location. Therefore, the word lantern began to replace the indecent word in various expressions (metonymy, i.e. transfer of a name by contiguity). Well, there is a certain logic in this. In any case, in the word lantern, a lantern exactly replaces a three-letter word. An indirect confirmation of this explanation is that the expression “ don’t care” (And I don’t give a damn) can be described in a similar way. This refers to the drum that hangs around the drummer's neck. All this then falls into a series of expressions like from the bulldozer or to the star.

To be honest, I prefer my version about the decent, musical origin of expressions from the lantern to the lantern. But the interesting thing is that in some ways it doesn't matter. Linguistic expressions often seem to have multiple motivations. The person who first said some expression meant one thing, and the one who picked up the expression heard something of his own in it and threw it into speech with this new internal form. That is, the etymology of an expression is not necessarily linear, and this applies not only to phraseological units, but also to words. By the way, if in speech there is a frequency expression from a lantern (say, in a musical sense), it is quite natural to rethink it as a euphemism, even without involving a miner’s lantern.