Nash russki weblog

Michele A. Berdy

from
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/08/04/007.html



Friday, August 4, 2006. Issue 3468


Who You Gonna Call?
By Michele A. Berdy


Пользователь: user; physician (archaic)

Let's say -- hypothetically, of course -- that you have succumbed to a summer cold, which -- again hypothetically -- has gotten worse and worse, despite using every folk remedy your Russian friends have been suggesting to you by e-mail, phone, and text message. You give up. Time to call a doctor. So whom do you call? And what do you call the doc?

Well, if you were in Russia a century or so ago, you might have called the doctor пользователь. Today, this is the word for a user of something, like пользователь Интернета (an Internet user), but once upon a time it was the word for a healer, someone who provided польза (which once meant "relief" or "succor," but now means "benefit"). In old texts you can find delightful phrases such as Кто вас пользует? (Who is treating you?), which today sounds like a weird version of "Who is using you?"

In the olden days, you might also have called upon the services of лекарь (physician, healer), a word that you see now as the name of a drug store chain, Старый Лекаръ (the Old Physician) -- a Russian version of Ye Olde Apothecary Shoppe, complete with some bogus old orthography.

Today, for qualified medical care you'll want врач (doctor). You may be disconcerted to discover that the word is derived from archaic meanings of врать (which now means "to lie") and ворчать ("to growl"). Actually, it's even worse: The original meaning of both words was connected with the casting of spells and wizardry. So when you go to a doctor, you are knowingly putting your life in the hands of a snarling, lying charlatan.

Etymologically speaking, that is.

Contemporary doc-talk in Russian also poses some problems for us English-speakers. You can call a modern physician доктор, although Russians use the word a bit differently than we use its counterpart. You might ask: Скажите, доктор, сколько дней надо принимать лекарство? (Doctor, how many days should I take the medicine?). But Russians don't use it as an honorific title: you can't say Доктор Петров the way we say Dr. Smith.

If your doctor is a woman, you can still call her врач and address her as доктор. This seems simple until you come across врачиха and докторша. Врачиха is "woman doctor" and, depending on the context, speaker, and tone of voice, can have connotations from the most negative to the most positive. Most of the time you hear a sneer in it, but not among the down-home folks: Надо будет врачихе цветочков подарить. Классная женщина. (I've got to get that lady doctor some flowers. She's really classy.)

The meaning and connotation of докторша is even trickier. In the old days, the suffix -ша at the end of a noun for a professional denoted "wife of." So докторша meant the doctor's wife. A famous Chekhov short story begins with the death of doctor's young son and the phrase: докторша опустилась на колени перед кроваткой (the doctor's wife got down on her knees in front of the crib). By the early Soviet period докторша meant "woman doctor," but today it is usually folksy or condescending.

I personally avoid both words like the plague: Insulting your physician will not get you good medical care.

If -- Боже упаси! (God forbid!) -- you end up in the hospital, you need to know what to call the staff. A nurse is медицинская сестра или медицинский брат (literally "medical sister or brother") -- and more commonly медсестра and медбрат. My nurse friend tells me that patients address her as сестра or sometimes the affectionate сестричка: Сестра, вы не подскажете, когда доктор придёт? (Nurse, can you tell me when the doctor is coming?) But for some reason a nurse named Boris is never addressed as брат; patients either address him by name and patronymic or name alone.

If all of this is making your head spin, the moral is: Don't get sick in the first place.

Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.

posted by Kate @ 9:53 PM