Deputy

My nine-year-old daughter asked what it means: And the card will gather dust / On a shelf of yellowed books from the song “The tanks rumbled on the field.” This reminded me of how intrigued a foreign professor I knew was when he saw the sign “Replacing Batteries” in Moscow. I disappointed him by explaining that it was just about the batteries in the watch. Naturally, I told my daughter that the card was a photograph (as they say now, a photo). Of course, she immediately reminded me: You see - the card is wrinkled, / There are puppies in ski jackets - / none of the deaths from D. Sukharev’s song “Alma Mater” (I don’t know, by the way, why it’s hyphenated, but that’s how they write it in Russian). Of course, she also recited Pasternak’s I live with your card, the one that laughs (“Deputy”). Why, my St. Petersburg aunt still sometimes calls photographs cards.

My daughter was completely satisfied, but I myself continued to think about the word card . The fact is that a card, in principle, is a rectangular piece of cardboard (nowadays sometimes not cardboard, but plastic), which fixes, confirms, certifies something. Indeed, in some way, a substitute. It’s no wonder that the objects to which this word refers change over time. I remember Shenderovich's observation: SIGNS OF THE TIME. At my six-year-old daughter’s birthday party in 1992, her two boyfriends, the son of a journalist and the son of a businessman, were having a decorous conversation.

— Do you have a business card? — asked the journalist’s son.

“Only credit,” answered the businessman’s son, without stopping chewing.

And it’s true - they used to be filmed on the card, but now they are removed from the card. Business cards , however, are from Bunin, and now they are more often called business cards , but before a business card was called a type of half-tailcoat, caftan, frock coat. It is and only this meaning that is presented in the dictionaries of V. I. Dahl and D. N. Ushakov. Nowadays, small handbags, usually for men, are also called business cards (they are also purses, they are... better keep silent). But let's not get distracted.

Pushkin also used the word card (and even earlier, back in the 18th century), and in two meanings at once - both as a business card and as a diminutive in relation to a playing card. In general, in the texts of the 19th century. the word card in the overwhelming majority of cases refers either to a business card or, later, to a photograph (as part of the combination photographic card or simply card ): It’s good that today in fourteen houses there were no housewives, I left the cards, and in eight houses they accepted - you had to drag yourself up the stairs! - she added with a sigh. [AND. A. Goncharov. May Month in St. Petersburg (1891)]; She stood up and, taking off her hat, took an album on the table that contained photographic cards of her son at other ages. She wanted to compare the cards and began to take them out of the album. She took them all out. There was only one, last, best card left. He was sitting astride a chair in a white shirt, frowning with his eyes and smiling with his mouth. This was his most special, best expression. [L. N. Tolstoy. Anna Karenina (1878)].

cards , Chekhov However, for example, in addition to photographic and business also has many cards related to the population census: For the copying, I used cards that were printed for me in the printing house at the police department. <… > I recorded only the actual family members; if they told me that the eldest son went to Vladivostok to work, and the second serves in the village of Rykovsky as a worker, then I did not write down the first at all, but put the second on the card at his place of residence. <… > I have a lot of craftsmen marked on my cards that you can’t do without in the city: carpenters, upholsterers, jewelers, watchmakers, tailors, etc. [A. P. Chekhov. Sakhalin Island (1893-1895)]. I'm afraid that since then the situation with the census has worsened considerably.

The twentieth century also knows many other cards: grain cards, postal cards , accounting cards , etc. This is what’s curious. In Ushakov's dictionary (volume 1 was published in 1935) the meanings are given in the following order: 1. Photographic image; 2. Business card in the modern sense; 3.Identification (membership card) ; 4.3 I will quote here: “Form with cut-off coupons for receiving service rations, rationed products and goods (new official)” (ration card, sugar on cards); 5. Menu (this meaning existed in the 19th century, but then disappeared. There is, however, a wine list); 6. Cardboard rectangle - catalog, library card. When we started working on a synonymous dictionary, and this was twenty years ago, we did not yet have computers, and we collected examples by writing them down on cards; 7. Playing card. In the modern dictionary edited by Kuznetsov, it is approximately the same, only in a different order, starting with the catalogue. Of course, new dictionaries should contain all sorts of banking, credit, debit, discount, bonus and other cards. It’s also interesting that in modern language all these cards are increasingly called cards. This is the result of repeated borrowing typical of the current situation: the means of payment is called card because there is an English word card, although the Russian word card would be more suitable in meaning . And the social card is officially called a card , and in the advertisements they write: Credit cards are temporarily not accepted, although we often ask: Can I pay with a card?

As for Kuznetsov’s dictionary, the only funny thing is that it contains “bus, tram card (monthly ticket for travel on public transport).” Of course, the dictionary is from St. Petersburg. In Moscow, they didn’t know the word card in this meaning, but they said a travel ticket or travel ticket (in transport they announced: Present travel and single tickets to the passengers around you) . Current electronic cardboard cards are officially called tickets, although they can also be called cards orally.

In general, the word ticket has a similar meaning and in many contexts competes with a card. By the way, I remembered a fragment from “War and Peace”, where Princess Marya discusses raising children with her husband: When I gave him a ticket in the evening, he again burst into tears pitifully, kissing me. With him, everything can be done with tenderness. — What is a ticket? - Nikolai asked. “I started giving notes to my elders in the evenings about how they behaved. As a child, it still seemed strange to me to use the word ticket here.

The ticket and the card also compete in the meaning of “certificate, mandate.” I just looked at the recently purchased famous “Safire's Political Dictionary”. William Safire, who recently died, wrote a weekly column, “On Language,” for the New York Times Magazine for many years. From these columns his political dictionary was compiled. So, there, in particular, the expression card-carrying appears - initially, in the 30s, about communists - in order to distinguish a real ardent and zealous communist from fellow travelers and sympathizers, and then about republicans and others. I thought that card -carrying Communist should, perhaps, be translated as a communist with a party card .