For a Rainy Day

This week, our featured word is the Russian word for sock, носок, amusingly pronounced no-sock. The weather has been inconsistent and, after several days of summery weather, I stashed away my warm wool socks only to go fetch them back a few days later.

Most of my winter socks were given to me as gifts during a winter trip to Ukraine. My partner's parents didn't trust a silly American to come prepared for the harsh rigors of a Ukrainian winter. Armed with one third of an introductory Russian course and wishing to express my gratitude, I pulled out my pocket Russian dictionary, and confidently proclaimed, "Спасибо за носоки!" My hosts burst into laugher. When their laugher had subsided, they kindly explained masculine nouns with stems that end in -ок lose the vowel о when the и is added. So носок becomes носки. Dropped vowel or no, the warmth of my toes was guaranteed and I spent the rest of the trip assuring my hosts that I was hatless by choice and was not going to freeze.

Head in the Clouds

An extra vowel in my носки was one of the smaller mistakes I made on that trip. Learning new languages, you expect to make mistakes; you don't expect to be speaking the wrong language altogether. Compensating for my limited vocabulary with extra politeness, my contribution to conversations consisted almost entirely of saying спасибо (thank you). However, we were in Western Ukraine and after half a day of спасибо-ing, I was finally informed that, despite the similarities between Ukrainian and Russian, спасибо is unique to Russian and that I should probably be using the Ukrainian, дякую, instead.

It turns out носки are also unique to Russian: the Ukrainian word for socks is шкарпетки (pronounced shkarpetky).

Sitting on a cold rock outside the Museum of Folk Architecture in Lviv, I bet Shevchenko wishes he had some теплі шкарпетки.