Pretense, nothing more

The heroine of the next “Word and Anti-Word” www.mn.society_edu/20130308/339289799.html , “songwriter and musician Natalya O’Shea (Helavisa),” who, among other things, has introduced herself as a linguist, says that she hates frankly illiterate words of the “exciting” type . That’s interesting, I think, what’s so frankly illiterate about the word exciting? There’s just some kind of unnecessary exaltation in him, but there’s nothing wrong with literacy. But she further explains: “I can’t stand the incorrect accents and new formations of the eighties - I already mentioned the terrible word “exciting.” What is this word? Who is the “exciter” ? Well, she says she's a linguist. What does the excitement have to do with it? What if there is a word intoxicating - there must be intoxicating ? Or is it also illiterate? And delightful is delightful? Teeth-crushing - tooth-crushing ? Finally, if it’s awesome, then it’s awesome ?

No, who can argue, the word exciting cannot be called neutral. Moreover, it is included in the list of routine speech roughnesses, which every cultural speaker of the Russian language can easily reproduce when woken up in the middle of the night ( coffee is masculine, putting on and we don’t confuse putting on, calling and lying down is terrible, as if it were a parasitic word). That's not the problem. People often think that “normality” or “abnormality” is an immanent property of a word, rooted in its structure. In fact, each word simply has its own ways of entering the language, its own life history, its own coloring, which it can acquire, lose or change. They tell us: “exciting ” is a normal word, but “exciting” is an abnormal word. But a normal word is just a word that has been fixed in the language with a neutral connotation. And the one that is not fixed seems abnormal. The word, for example, indivisible instead of individuality now seems stupid or strange, but once it did not seem so. After all, the word touching is the same in structure as exciting , but it is neutral. And touching did not enter the language at all. But had it turned out differently, the touching and exciting options would have won, and the same people with the same pathos would have talked about the absurdity of the touching and exciting options .

And then, why is this exciting - “a new formation of the 80s”? Here you go: You can remain calm and joyful in a crowd, even in the face of the most exciting spectacle, and you can, while lying in bed, torment yourself with your thoughts, so that you will choke from excitement . [L.N. Tolstoy. Letters. (1894)]; And why is everything in the world so strange, so exciting? “Exciting , ” Martyn repeated loudly and was pleased with the word.” (Nabokov. “Feat”, 1931 (first publication)); “If” such awkwardness happened in reality, it would bring us many unpleasant, exciting minutes. [K.S. Stanislavsky. An actor's work on himself (1938)]; For the Art Theater, censorship allowed previously prohibited places, and all of Moscow anxiously awaited this performance, fearing that their favorite theater would have to give up the palm in this production to the Maly Theater. [N.F. Baliev. Memoirs (1930-1936)]. By the way, the fashion for this word probably came from Stanislavsky, from the actors of his school. Aksenov says something wonderful about this: She didn’t know how to perform, she was very confused, she said some stereotyped words typical of “people of art”: “somewhere in the grand scheme of things” and “exciting” instead of “exciting” - and pronounced adjectives in the Moscow Art Theater accent, that is, in a way that I have never spoken in life or on screen . [Vasily Aksenov. It's time, my friend, it's time (1963)]. Indeed, for a long time something actorly was felt in this word. As one of the readers wrote to me in confirmation of this: “About “exciting,” my father, an inveterate theatergoer, explained to me in my childhood, in the 60s, that only artists say that.”

There's something else that's interesting here. It's actually understandable why people liked to say exciting instead of exciting . The word exciting by that time had already captured a very wide range of emotions, including very “public” ones: With the speed of a satellite, the exciting news of the successful launch of a space rocket by the Soviet Union in the direction of the Moon flew around Beijing and the entire 600 million-strong China. [“Northern collective farmer”, 1959.01.06]; After all, now the moment has come very close - the most burning, exciting, joyful, terrible moment - the moment of the first test of the machine. [A.A. Beck. Talent (Life of Berezhkov) / Parts 1-3 (1940-1956)]. And when the word exciting came into use, it was intended to emphasize the purely private nature of the experience, some special spiritual trepidation, but its fate was unsuccessful: an unpleasant shade of affectation appeared in it, for which it was joyfully branded. And now very few people use this word without quotation, but many people mention in discussions that there are some words in bad taste - and these arguments were already in the 60s and 70s.

Speaking of experiences. I have long wanted to write about how the use of the word experience has changed . Since childhood, it seems to me that in the phrase from Okudzhava’s song about a jacket (1960) And he himself is worried about everything: / What if something is wrong. Such an eccentric is somehow commonplace. Quite cute, but still. I also remember how homely Naina Yeltsina said in a TV interview after Korzhakov’s betrayal: Boris Nikolaevich is very worried. It is clear that there is a classic use of the word experience in the emotional sense: He was deeply affected by the betrayal of a friend. But at some point this everyday colloquialism arose: He is very worried - it seems quite new. Moreover, unlike the classic experience of betrayal , which is purely retrospective, the “new” can also be prospective. That is, in this sense, you can worry not only about what has already happened (as in the example with Yeltsin), but also about the possible (what if something goes wrong - as in the example of Okudzhava). And I wondered how new it was, this meaning. You can roughly estimate this by searching in the National Corpus of the Russian Language (ruscorpora.ru) for the combination worry+what. Of course, it is clear that there will be garbage, but not much (for example, phrases like what he was worried about, what he felt ). Well, here we go. In total there are more than a couple of hundred of these in the corps, but nothing at all before the beginning of the 20th century, but in the first half of the 20th century there are only a couple of examples, but there were: - So, as I understand you, you are not very worried about what comes here got it? [P.F. Nilin. The Last Theft (1937)]; Valya, I never thought that I would be so worried that you left alone. [A.A. Fadeev. Young Guard (1943-1951)]. Well, in general, it’s not exactly new, but it really spread not so long ago. Something like this was clearly happening with this word exactly at the time to which the examples refer, it’s not for nothing that it’s in quotation marks here: I myself was so fussy with my drawings back then, I was so “experienced” by all this. [G.S. Efron. Diaries. T. 1. (1940)]. In general, we will have to do this.