This is copied from a previous thread titled “Your most embarrassing foreign-language mistake?” but it may bear retelling here, as it relates to **China Guy’s ** tale:
Fall of 1989 again, in my dorm room in Leningrad. After 3 years of straight A’s in Russian, I was discovering the huge gaps in my vocabulary, much to my dismay, and was trying desperately to remedy them by reading everything in sight. One day I picked up a jar of tomatoes in hopes of reading the ingredients label. As Soviet food labeling regulations were much more lax than American ones, I couldn’t find anything useful, no matter how hard I squinted at the jar.
My roommate (thank God she was the only other person in the room!) asked me what on Earth I was doing. I should note that she was a supremely brainy, but rather socially conservative person by Western standards, although more probably open-minded than most people raised in her circumstances. She was Kazakh, and nominally Muslim, but of a very old intellectual family; her grandfather was the only modern Kazakh novelist well-known outside of Kazakhstan, and her father was at one point the Kazakh Ambassador to China. She was, at the time, married to a very conservative and jealous Kazakh village boy who apparently had fits whenever she so much as spoke to another man, even professionally. At the time we knew each other, she had left him and their 2-year-old daughter to come to Leningrad and take her Ph.D. comps in Arabic literature. She later divorced him and finished her Ph.D., and last I heard of her she was happily remarried to a Dutch guy and running the Soros Fund office in Almaty. But I digress.
Anyway, I explained in my very limited Russian that I wanted to know what else was in the jar, besides tomatoes. “But what else would there possibly be?” she asked. I wanted to reply, “Maybe preservatives,” but didn’t know the Russian for preservatives, and guessed “preservativy.” As all you speakers of European languages will recognize, if you can stop laughing long enough, “preservativy” means “condoms” in Russian, and has similar cognates in several other European languages that I know of. Knowing Spanish and some French, I should have known better, but oh well. The best part was when she tried to explain what I had just said, and couldn’t find the word in any of the half-dozen dictionaries we had in the room; she had to resort to a line drawing! A long and very educational discussion of the Soviet condom predicament followed, including sidebars on state vs. black-market prices for various makes and vintages.
The following week in class, we had a discussion on the role of the black market, and the professor (who we always suspected was KGB) asked, somewhat rhetorically, if we had any idea how much a Western-manufactured (i.e. halfway reliable) condom cost as a percentage of the average monthly salary (then about 240 rubles; a condom ran anywhere from 3-5), with reference to the natural effect the situation had on the abortion rate (quite horrendous; the average Soviet woman had 6-8 abortions in a lifetime, a figure which probably would have been even higher if not for the insane rate of post-op complications and ensuing sterility). I unconsciously shook my head yes in comment; the professor noticed, and ribbed me as to how I was so intimately acquainted with this tidbit of information. Much classroom hilarity ensued.
