'kushat''

[Jules Levin]

Since the thread goes on, I decided to throw in my 2 cents.
When I was a Russian student sometime 1958-1964, I had a rare opportunity
to talk with some relatives of relatives (my cousin's aunt and uncle) who
were intelligentsia from the Russian(-Jewish) colony in Harbin, in fact
they may have even been born in China.  She had graduated from the
pharmaceutical college there, he had been a cafe musician and artist.  They
assured me that jest' was vulgar, impolite.  The only "correct" verb for
human beings was kushat'.  Eventually I came to understand that this was a
class marker, and the polite norm in a remote outpost could be even more
stringent than in the center.
Jules Levin

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