‘This will interest you,’ said my husband, looking up from the smeared screen of his telephone. For once he was right.
It was a Twitter post about a memorable remark during the invasion of Ukraine. Snake Island is a small, bare outpost in the Black Sea near the Danube Delta. When a Russian cruiser invited the Ukrainian soldiers stationed there to surrender, they replied, ‘Йди на хуй’, transliterated as ‘Idi na khuy’.
The point of the tweet was that their remark had been translated in a rather American way as ‘Go fuck yourself’, and a more idiomatic version in British English would be ‘Fuck off’. I agree, though it is not that simple.
I don’t know Russian or Ukrainian, but idi certainly means ‘go’. Na is a preposition meaning ‘for’. Khuy is the difficult word to translate.
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