Word: ignoramus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...great, I thought, and even though I'm a laundry ignoramus right now, I appreciate all those years you did my laundry...
...Little Adin read Lenin and Freud before his bar mitzvah. Later, however, the family saw to it that he was tutored in the Talmud and attended a religious high school. Explained Avraham: "I don't care if you are a heretic. I don't want you to be an ignoramus...
Therefore I am sending out a distress signal to the world. Please answer my call, save me from the terrible fate that awaits an ignoramus admitted into the company of educated men and women. The list of things I cannot figure out is long-ranging, from problems of organic chemistry to why we get no credit for missed meals in the dining hall. But at least if I can get a few items answered I will have made some progress...
Moscow's English translations of the official Soviet statements on the Korean jetliner were sprinkled with quaint and creaky colloquialisms. Ronald Reagan, said TASS, is acting like an "ignoramus" who sheds "crocodile tears." Protesters who picketed the Long Island estate of the Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations behaved like "hooligans." All this international outrage amounts to a "hullabaloo." It was as if a Soviet translator had stumbled onto a dusty dictionary of Anglo-American slang, circa...
Close. In fact, Soviet translators have been weaned on Dickens, Thackeray, Twain and other 19th century writers, which explains why Moscow's attacks, once translated, sometimes seem comically grandiloquent. The colorful terms of last week entered the Russian-English dictionaries at the beginning of the century. Ignoramus, first popularized in England in the 1600s as a synonym for dunce, is Latin for "we do not know." In the original Russian version, the word is nevezhda, which means "an ignorant person." Krokodilovy slyozy, which translates literally as "tears of the crocodile," derives from a Russian fable similar to the Western...