There's a small mystery in Tolstoi's Sebastopol in 1855. An officer drives "a telyezhka, which [says Tolstoi] stands halfway between a Jewish britchka, a Russian travelling-cart, and a basket-wagon." How in the arithmetical world can any object be "half-way" between three different kinds of wagons? A translation problem, let's hope. Moreover, the word "telyezhka" doesn't appear in any of my English dictionaries. An internet search located the not very precise definition, "baggage cart." And what the heck is a "Jewish britchka?" In nineteenth-century Russia, did horse-drawn vehicles have religion? Not according Gogol in Dead Souls, where a britchka is specifically located in terms not of ethnicity, but of class; it's a "light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, and land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls." (Is it like or unlike a troika or a drozhky?) "Telyezhka" and "britchka" made me realize that my notions about horse-drawn vehicles are extremely hazy, and that when I read pre-internal-combustion novels I pay too little attention to the distinctions that separate Jaguars from jalopies; they're all coaches to me. But surely it makes a difference whether our hero arrives in a fly ("a horse drawn public coach") or a trap ("a light, often sporty, two or four wheeled carriage in which passengers sit face-to face") or a landau ("a large four-wheeled covered carriage"). Not to mention chaise, phaeton, cabriolet, sulky, surrey, curricle, barouche, brougham, gig, hansom, buggy, victoria, four-wheeler, and dogcart.
Also in Tolstoi's Sebastopol; frequent references to "gabions," which are "hollow cylinders of wicker or strap-iron like a basket without a bottom which are filled with earth and used in building fortifications." If they have no bottoms, how are they filled?
Other words new to me: from The Return of the Native, a number of lovely dialect words from Thomas Hardy's county of Dorset: "nunnywatch," predicament; "stunpoll," blockhead; "gallicrow," scarecrow; "kex," the dry, hollow stem of a plant; "knap," the summit of a small hill; "vlankers," sparks; "huffle," a gust of wind; "fess," lively; "withywind," bindweed; "scroff," firewood debris; "scammish," clumsy; "twanky," complaining; and, most relevantly, "spring-van," a van "resembling a large wooden box with an arched roof that opens from behind."
Comments