Grossman - Mama - teryat' v vese

[Daniel E Collins]

With all respect to the Russian saying "'khudozhnik' ot slova 'khudo'", xudožnik is actually not derived from xudo.  It is formed from an archaic adjective xudog- 'skillful', well-attested in Old Church Slavonic and Old East Slavic, which was borrowed from Gothic *handags 'skilled' (cognate with English hand, handy).  By contrast, xudoj is an inherited (Proto-Slavic) lexeme *ksoud-, cognate with words in Sanskrit and Greek that convey negative evaluations.  The association between 'thinness' and 'starving artists' is a charming folk etymology.

Daniel E. Collins
Associate Professor of Slavic Linguistics
Ohio State University


On 1/1/10 5:28 PM, "greniers at GEORGETOWN.EDU" <greniers at GEORGETOWN.EDU> wrote:

Paul Gallagher wrote:

As a cultural value, however, some communities think all weight gain is
positive and all weight loss is negative. Probably a relic from the
times when famine was much more likely to kill you than heart disease,
diabetes, etc. in middle age.

Indeed.  The word "khudoi", of course, has both the meaning of low weight and of poverty/badness (plokhoi-khuzhe; sdelat' chto-to khudo-bedno, "'khudozhnik' ot slova 'khudo'", etc.)

Svetlana Grenier

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