query about a phrase

[William Ryan]

A list of words for getting drunk, that would indeed be a fine 
Rabelaisian project. A hundred, however, is small beer compared with the 
riches of English. One website has 305 as of 4 July - see 
http://matt.moviequote.net/drunk.htm. The nearest to a Russian published 
list of terms for a sticky end is perhaps 'master grobovykh del' 
Bezenchuk's list of expressions for dying in ch. 2 of  /Dvenadtsat' 
stul'ev/. Shorter but with exquisite socio-semantic annotation.
Will Ryan

Alina Israeli wrote:
> I would not want it to be called "reduplication", although in rhetoric 
> we do find similar examples of semantic repetition. The Google search 
> of "труба кранты" yielded 4 hits. On the other hand "дело труба"  
> produced 46,700, "ему кранты" over 1,200, the same for "нам кранты". 
> In other words the two words are not that often connected compared to 
> their individual usages.
>
> What is interesting here is that both of these nouns are used only as 
> predicates as in the above examples to produce the meaning of the 
> doom. There are other such fun phrases: "дело табак" 43,200, and 
> simply "дело швах" 14,400. While schwach is rather straightforward, 
> "tabac" is puzzling, because to my knowledge it is associated with a 
> lot of positive expressions in French.
>
> The list of words meaning 'end' or 'doom' could be vastly expanded 
> (каюк, капут, крышка...)
>
> This reminds me of the story told by Tomas Venclova that once after 
> some drinking he and Dovlatov started a list of synonyms of the words 
> meaning 'to get drunk'. When they got to #100 they simply stopped. I 
> wonder if anyone has such a list.  The situation with doomsday seems 
> to be just as fruitful.
>
>
> On Jul 6, 2007, at 7:25 AM, William Ryan wrote:
>
>> In view of the silence from Russian colleagues, I offer this. Not so 
>> much a phrase as a reduplication, roughly the first word means an 
>> impossible situation, the second means kaput. Listed in slang 
>> dictionaries, e.g. Slovar' tiuremnogo-lagerno-blatnogo zhargona, M. 
>> 1992. Steve Marder's Supplementary Dictionary (Slavica) lists kranty.
>> Will Ryan
>>
>> Sarah Hurst wrote:
>>> Can anyone explain to me the phrase: "труба, кранты!"? I think it 
>>> means a
>>> situation is hopeless, but I'd be grateful for any help.
>>>
>
> Alina Israeli
> LFS, American University
> 4400 Massachusetts Ave., NW
> Washington DC. 20016
> (202) 885-2387    
> fax (202) 885-1076
> aisrael at american.edu
>
>
>
>
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-- 

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Emeritus Professor W. F. Ryan FBA, FSA
Warburg Institute
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