Семантическая обво дочка

[Judson Rosengrant]

A conjecture for Sarah Hurst's inquiry:

An обводка (< обводить-обвести: to lead or conduct around) is a feint or, in
American sports language, a juke, or again in American usage, a 'shake and
bake' (I won't go into the derivation of that idiom other than to say that
it's interesting), and the diminutive обводочка of course means a little
feint or juke, although affection or admiration rather than size is probably
more the notion here: a nifty (sweet) little move that puts your opponent
back on his heels while you dart past him to the goal.  One would like a
context for your phrase (since we really should be translating not words or
phrases but contexts and other larger structures of meaning), but since the
phrase pertains to drinking, we may want to suppose that the opponent here
is life itself in its tediously sober aspect, the one from which you want to
break away, etc., etc. (I write this on a Friday).

Your phrase could thus be rendered pretty accurately in tone, meaning, and
playful rhyming structure as, 'beer for the shake [рывок] and vodka for the
bake [обводочка],' or, stretching it a bit but still keeping the underlying
sports allusion, 'beer for the bob [cf.  bob and weave] and vodka for the
lob'. . .  These variants don't preserve the double rhyme of the lovely
Russian, but they probably come as close as they can, given the fact that
one of the elements, 'vodka,' isn't an English word at all and therefore
doesn't lend itself very well to English morphophonemic play.

And play, whatever the tangle of forms and meanings, is really the point.

J. Rosengrant 

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