Pointed question

On April 13, in the town of Kramatorsk, an administrative building was seized, which was captured on video: http://youtu.be/qmxBjsU2rig . The video, as they now say, blew up the Internet - the green man there shouted: “We came with you, we are for you, move to the curb.” You can’t argue with linguistics: who will now believe in the self-defense of Donbass? St. Petersburg Donetsk resident. It is known that the curb occurs in St. Petersburg (and this is a standard example of St. Petersburg speech, like, for example, ceremonial or like a bun in the meaning of white bread), as well as in Karelia, Vladimir, Yekaterinburg, Norilsk and Novosibirsk [1].

Of course, it is impossible to seriously draw a conclusion about the participation of Russian special forces based on one word usage. You never know what this person’s history is: maybe he spent his childhood with a St. Petersburg grandmother or nanny, so the word stuck. It’s just that in a situation where everything, in general, was already clear, it was reminiscent of a joke about an American spy who for some reason was constantly exposed in the Vologda outback - and in the end it turned out that he was a black man.

Well, by the way, in the case of language, immediate sensations should not be underestimated. Let's say a woman comes to the sandbox with a child and says to him: Take your Easter eggs. Isn’t this phrase enough for you, if you are a native Muscovite, to confidently assume that the woman is visiting? And most likely, you will be right - because in Moscow they say molds and kulichiki and Muscovites never use the word paska in these meanings (in origin - the same as Easter; here, by the way, this mixture of Easter and Easter cake is wonderful). And they don’t use it at all, unless they know such an object as a sandbox - but this is not for the sandbox.

There was an unimaginable noise about this curb : jokes, demotivators, posters, linguistic discussions. In a matter of days, this word acquired a new meaning: curbs began to be used to call those who were called little green men in Crimea (Corbricks illegally connected Russian TV channels).

But objections immediately poured in, including from fellow linguists: yes, everything is fine in the Donbass with a curb, Google will help you, home-grown philologists. An interesting situation has arisen - the local residents write: I was born and studied in Kramatorsk, spent the summer in Gorlovka with my grandmother, drank beer in Slavyansk, went to dances in Donetsk - well, I haven’t heard of any curbs, we have curbs ! And in response: we don’t know anything, analysis of Yandex queries says something else [2].

No, we don’t have curbs, my colleague from Slavyansk, Vadim Ovcharenko, a teacher at the Faculty of Philology at Donbass State Pedagogical University, writes to me. He told me another interesting thing: after the famous video appeared, everyone began to discuss this curb - because it was crazy. I asked him to talk to his friends, to ask first: what is the name of the long block that borders the sidewalk, and if it is not a curb, then do they even know such a word. Of course I know! — one of his colleagues answered him. I read linguistic articles!

Now everything is easy to check, an acquaintance told me authoritatively, sending another request for a curb to buy in Kharkov. But the fact of the matter is that it is an illusion. Useful and simple technologies are fraught, however, with a false sense of easy accessibility of knowledge. Well, in this case we have a result that clearly contradicts what is obtained by directly addressing native speakers. This is explained as follows. There is a curb as an everyday word, and there is a nomenclature curb . In particular, there are a lot of curbs in price lists for building materials, in the jargon of road workers and cemetery workers, and sometimes in architects.

For example, in one of the GOSTs (Concrete and reinforced concrete side stones [3]), side stone is deciphered as a road curb, garden curb. The difference, however, is not indicated. There is also the idea that the curb and the curb are two different methods of laying: the curb on the edge, and the curb flat. But I can’t guarantee that such an understanding is widespread. That is, it is very possible that a person is buying a curb and trips over the curb.

By the way, in different places in everyday language there is also an eyebrow [4]. As for the nomenklatura language, the curb has its own geography, which does not at all coincide with the prevalence of the curb in everyday language. For example, for some reason they sell curbs very actively in the Rostov and Belgorod regions. But their resident may easily never hear this word - just as a person who does not use a laundry may never recognize the expression fashionable linen in his entire life .

How can our case with the curb be compared? There is such a thing as a tea glass. In Moscow this item will be called a mug, but in many other places it will be called a glass. Moreover, if you type in Yandex: buy a tea glass in Moscow, a huge number of online shopping sites will pop up, filled with pictures of multi-colored earthenware mugs with the signature tea glass. An outsider could say: well, don’t make things up, they say in Moscow a glass of tea. But we know what they don’t say. A friend told me how much fun she had when she encountered such a word for the first time - apparently a visiting roommate in the maternity hospital complained: I drank a whole glass of kefir, but still no stool.

I don’t want to say at all that you shouldn’t use instrumental methods. It's just not that straight forward. Linguist Alexander Piperski analyzed the distribution areas of the word curb in a somewhat more sophisticated way: “In the pilot version of the General Internet Corpus of the Russian Language (GIKRYA) there are 16 sub-corpora of texts from LiveJournal with a reliable regional reference. The volume of these subcorpora ranges from 5 to 45 million word forms; they cover 14 regions of Russia and 2 regions of Ukraine (Donetsk and Kiev regions). at least once in 13 sub-corpora, but if you look at the examples, in most cases these are metalinguistic discussions about the peculiarities of the Russian language in St. Petersburg.” The word curb appears

He further notes that “in reality, the word curb is used only in 3 of these 16 regions: of course, in St. Petersburg, as well as in the Sverdlovsk and Novosibirsk regions (apparently, primarily in regional centers - in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk - but there is not enough data to verify this). In the corpus of 11 million texts from the Donetsk region, the word curb occurs 14 times, curb - not once. The same can be checked using the advanced search of Yandex.Blogs by entering a curb and specifying a city - for example, Kramatorsk or Donetsk. It is clear that there is no curb there.”

And Vadim Ovcharenko from Slavyansk wrote to me: That’s it, I found a book in which I first encountered the word curb. This is a wonderful fantasy “The Many-Armed God of Dalaina” by Svyatoslav Loginov. 20 years ago. “Shoran opened his eyes and realized that he was alive. He himself didn’t notice when he jumped over the low stone curb bordering the wet Orikhon, and now under his feet was the dry, hard earth of the border Orikhon.” Needless to say, a simple Google help shows that the writer Svyatoslav Loginov is from Leningrad.