I can’t stand it any more! I’ve been whining about the way we Americans use misuse English constantly, and now I’m fed up with the way we Americans have been using misusing Russian. It all started with a (not-so) innocent movie released about this time last year (and now out in home-viewing form). The problem is that we see Cyrillic letters and know nothing about them. So we hear the Russians name their international space station “Mir” with the Russian word for “Peace” and spell it with Cyrillic letters that mean nothing. The “backwards ‘r’” is not an ‘r’ at all, but the Russian vowel ‘ya’ which by itself means ‘I’. The Russians use our letter ‘p’ for the letter ‘r’.

It’s all a lettering issue. When we see the letters CCCP on film of Olympics gone by we Americans think “See, See, See, Pea” and the Russian says “Ess, Ess, Ess, Are”. And this brings me to my gripe of the day. Just recently I saw another picture advertising the movie we Americans call “Bore-At”. The Russian letters (ВОЯДТ) look like B – O – R – A – T to most Americans. The Cyrillic letters used in the movie posters spell what would actually be VO-YaDT if transliterated into English.

There, now I’ve let off the steam, I don’t expect I’ll watch the movie, but I feel better.