From terms to mock the Russian foe to those that mask the grim reality of war, new usages abound
It was once a superstition only among Ukrainian air crew: the word “last”, especially in the context of a last or final meeting, should be avoided as it denotes a premonition of death.Since Russia’s full-scale invasion ofhas gained far wider usage, employed by soldiers and some civilians in a country where everyone knows someone who is serving at the front.
There is “avatar” for a drunken soldier, derived from a Ukrainian expression to get drunk or “blue” – a reference to the James Cameron blockbuster about blue aliens. “A lot of the new words began appearing in 2014,” says Les Beley of the Potebnya linguistics institute at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. “But some words are even older … In general, the process is that there is certain lexicon of words that had a narrow usage in the military that now have a much wider context.
The incursion into civilian language of military slang in times of war – and other neologisms - is not a new phenomenon. As conflict alters societies, it also changes the way they talk about conflict. Some language serves to create a distance from the horrible reality or reinforce social solidarity, but in other cases it provides a useful tool to talk about the reality of the experience.
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