Is it? I don’t know.
timujin
Karma: 488
As I said, охуить is not usually used on its own, and its meaning is only relevant when you derive things from it. And it is a transitive verb.
Also, this thread gives me giggles.
Okay, instead of making myself feel better by professing myself of possessing knowledge mere mortals do not, I will at least try to describe what is going on in this word (it is going to be very simplified and with some omissions, because I am no linguist and am operating from instinct).
Let’s start with хуй, that means “dick”. “Хуеть” is this word transformed into a verb, which can get a lot of different meanings as it goes, but we’ll just focus on one—“becoming progressively more and more surprised/daunted”. “Охуеть” transforms it from continuous form into “have become” form, with a touch of “all over” or “completely” meaning added in. Then goes “охуить”, which is the same verb in a sort of passive involuntary form, from “become” to “having been made to become”. Note that “охуить” is not usually used on its own. At this point we have “forcibly make one dauntingly surprised enough that 1) you usually can become that surprised only by progressively becoming more and more surprised for a very long time 2) it is totally all over you, as in, it is now a dominant feeling”. From “охуить” we get “охуительный”, which is a standard way to transform a verb into adjective, so the meaning specified above is now used as adjective. From “охуительный” we get “охуительно” which looks like adjective being transformed into adverb, but that’s optical illusion (although you can potentially use it as an adverb “awesomely”). What actually happened, is that we just stripped the word from its referent. So, it’s just very generalized version of “охуительный”.
So, you can use “охуительно” as an adverb “awesomely”, or as a generalized “awesome” without a referent, like a cheer (Awesome!!!). The adverb version can alternatively just amplify the “all over” meaning, so you can use it as a strong “very”, or “so much that it it daunting”. You can use “охуительный” as an adjective “awesome”, like in “awesome thing”.
Compared to “awesome”, “охуительно” is much easier to use in a negative form, as a sarcasm (“My car just broke, that is just awesome”), because nowhere it is specified that the surprise must be positive. That one helps to combo it with all the other profanity to complicate and refine its meaning even further, abusing this ambiguity.
Правда, охуительно?
Edit: I forgot about one more factor: “хуеть” does get a couple of additional meanings as it goes in this case, namely “be nuts/asshole”. “Ты что, охуел?” == “Are you nuts?/How do you dare?/You must be an asshole if you are doing this”. I am not going to elaborate how exactly this meaning adds to the final word.
I would be delighted to read it. Please, do happen to write it.
Okay, a valid hypothesis, but I don’t think it is actually the case. I learned English for 2 years with a teacher, and then via books, internet and video games. I certainly did have negative social experiences in Russian. But the comfortableness doesn’t feel like being more light and effortless. More like more powerful, less unwieldy, more precise and compact. As a programmer, I often have the same set of feelings with programming languages, and I assure you, I wasn’t bullied in school in C++.
As another native Russian speaker, I can say that Russian profanity is indeed powerful, but is not as precise as the parent post puts it.
There is no extra meaning in “challenge”. “Вызов” and “испытание” cover the English word “challenge” more or less completely. The problem is that they also accidentally cover the English word “ordeal” as well. Challenge is not something bad or painful, but ordeal is. When you say you want “испытание”, you can potentially be understood as “I want more pain in my life”, which is not what English “I want a challenge” means.
I have some trouble understanding what you want. Try to rephrase, or expand.
If nothing else, your writing is better than that of a high proportion of people on the internet.
Do you know me?
More generally, you could explore the idea of everyone being more competent than you at everything. Is there evidence for this? Evidence against it? Is it likely that you’re at the bottom of ability at everything?
I find a lot of evidence for it, but I am not sure I am not being selective. For example, I am the only one in my peer group that never did any extra-curricular activities at school. While everyone had something like sports or hobbies, I seemed to only study at school an waste all my other time surfing the internet and playing the same video games over and over.
Err, that’s not it. I am no more successful than them. Or, at least, I kinda feel that everyone else is more successful than me as well.
I have a constant impression that everyone around me is more competent than me at everything. Does it actually mean that I am, or is there some sort of strong psychological effect that can create that impression, even if it is not actually true? If there is, is it a problem you should see your therapist about?
Yes, it is.
It strikes me that you’re simply more comfortable thinking in English.
Which begs the question: why is it so that my native language that I spoke since I was two and everyone in my circle understands, is less comfortable for me than a foreign language I am not even confident in my skill with, possess a limited vocabulary (compared to Russian), and have much less practice in?
It seems like half your complaints are that Russian doesn’t make some distinction that English does and the other half are that Russian forces you to make distinctions that English doesn’t
Not being able to make a distinction and forcing you to make a distinction, are both bad. Look at the “It isn’t a fish” example. In English you can distinguish between “It isn’t a fish” and “It isn’t a mammal”, or you can leave it ambiguous (“It isn’t”). If you can make a distinction, but don’t have to, it gives you a lot more flexibility than both “not able to” and “can and must”. Russian is inflexible exactly because of that.
I think Russian is just worse at carving reality at its joints. Accuracy and precision and two very different things, down to the point that more precision = less accuracy and vice-versa. That’s a good distinction. Forcing you to specify a noun’s gender when you’re talking about it, with said genders distributed mostly randomly/historically (dare you to say why “mechanism” is male, “machine” is female, and “device” is neuter?), makes no sense, because different-gendered items do not have different behaviour. That’s a bad distinction.
No, it’s actually fun. Brief examples:
“It depends”. I have never been able to get away with just saying “it depends”—Russian version prompts you to either specify what it depends on, or explicitly refuse to, begging the question of why I am being so sneaky.
There is no word that means “complexity”, but can not be alternatively understood as “difficulty”. When I tell someone I want a complex challenge, they ask why I am not carrying heavy things around, as that is quite difficult.
In same vein, no word for “challenge” that doesn’t also mean “ordeal”. The distinction seems to be also missing from Russian brains, a very peculiar phenomenon that Russian culturologists are always upset about.
No different words for ‘accuracy’ and ‘precision’.
No word for ‘awesome’ that is both strong enough and can be shown on TV. But, on the other hand, the obscene word for ‘awesome’ is much more awesome that ‘awesome’.
English tenses are more flexible and consistent. Russian only has three, plus the standalone “have been”-like form. They don’t distinguish between “I do things” and “I am doing things”, for instance.
In English, you can put an emphasis on ‘am’ or ‘is’. In Russian, to do that, you need to throw in a few extra words.
Context-independency. Russian has a small basic vocabulary, and compensates it with insanely complex syntactic structures that makes it harder to pull a couple of words from a sentence and understand what it is about.
To even things a bit, here are some advantages of Russian over Englsh:
Phonetics. If you know how to write a word, you automatically and unambiguously (with a single notable exception) know how to pronounce it. It works a little less perfect the other way around, but good enough that Russian spelling bees do not exist and don’t even make sense.
English has a ridiculously huge amount of words that sound the same or similar, like ‘to’, ‘two’ and ‘too’, or ‘bot’ and ‘bought’. The last one is just horrible—you insert three new letters, doubling word’s length, and it still sounds the same. No such thing is possible in Russian.
Words “себя” and “авось”.
Word formation. It is much more flexible than in English. You can easily say things like “недоперепрыгнул”, which means “tried, but not succeeded, to jump over something”.
Distinction between singular and plural “you”.
Mat. English swearing pales in comparison to this.
Yeah.
Articles. Not only there are none in Russian, but there is nothing that serves their function.
Happens all the time:
-- I just put my towel to laundry.
-- Okay.
-- But I just realised that I need towel again. Could you go fetch towel for me?
-- Here, I brought you towel.
-- This is another towel.
-- Oh, so you needed that very towel that you put into laundry?
-- Oh. (switching to English) I wanted to say “I need the towel”, not “I need a towel”!
Next, Russian often requires you to specify a lot of extra info, compared to English. Example:
-- Why is that thing a fish?
-- It isn’t. (because it’s a dolphin)
“It is a fish” = “Это рыба” (it fish). No ‘is’ in this sentence in Russian. So, instead of “it isn’t” you must say “it isn’t a fish”. There is no easy way to say this sentence without using the word “fish” or some extra clumsy wording like “not the thing you are asking about”. That makes it very hard to make stuff like chatbots in Russian, or write generic lines for RPG games where the same line can be used in different circumstances.
Same thing with grammatical genders. When you say “X does Y”, you must specify gender of X in Y’s form. A lot of media was botched in translation, when one character thinks that another character is a girl when he’s actually a guy (and is not trying to deliberately deceive). In Russian, it is hard to say more than a couple of sentences without revealing your gender in the process.
Is that enough? There is more where that came from.
I’m a bit confused by the word “spell”, and wonder whether you mean the fourth definition given here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/spell?s=t
More like the first definition. I meant, you can perform some linguistical acrobatics and say “complexity, but not difficulty” in a compact way, but that wouldn’t be a proper way to say it from the perspective of strict Russian grammar, and you are not guaranteed to be universally understood.
I came to realise, that I use the word ‘fun’ in its original English pronounciation (фан) quite a lot in Russian speech, as do my peers. It seems that we have just adopted it.
Веселье. It’s a bit closer to “joy” or “merry-ness”, though. Why?
At THOSE games? Yes. I can complete about half of American McGee’s Alice blindfolded. Other games? General gaming? No. Or, okay, I am better than non-gamers, but my kinda-gamer peers are crub-stomping me at multiplayer in every game.
Studying—very easy. Now, when I am a university student—quite hard.