This comes close ;-)
Posted on 11/07/2003 7:39:04 PM PST by blam
Putin's language is becoming the talk of the vulgar
By Julius Strauss in Moscow
(Filed: 08/11/2003)
President Vladimir Putin has a reputation for foul-mouthed asides, but Italian journalists sitting in straight-backed chairs in a Kremlin reception room cannot have expected what was coming.
Opposite them, Vladimir Putin, immaculately dressed and statesmanlike, answered a question about one of the country's notorious billionaires. The interpreter's voice petered away into embarrassed silence. "You must always obey the law, not just when they've got you by the balls" is a rough equivalent of what Mr Putin had said.
For a western politician such a salty choice of words, shown on national television, might mean political embarrassment, even censure.
But President Putin, once seen as a faceless KGB officer with a wooden delivery, now regularly sprinkles his public statements with the argot of the street. Moscow liberals are appalled and say he is betraying his lack of pedigree for the highest office in the land.
But many ordinary Russians adore Putin's earthy indiscretions for the grit and defiance of convention that they convey.
For many, they carry echoes of Nikita Khrushchev, the most boorish of Soviet leaders who took off his shoe at the United Nations and banged it on the lectern.
Prof Robert Russell, the head of the Russian department at Sheffield University, said: "Like Khrushchev, Putin has an earthy turn of phrase. It means people see him as one of their own. He's always controlled and usually rather unemotional but there's something else Russians respond to, something more visceral. I think he does these things deliberately for that reason."
Mr Putin had only just come to power when he uttered his first corker, saying he would deal with Chechens by "wiping them out in the shit house".
Last year when a French journalist asked a hostile question at a European Union summit in Brussels, the Russian president said: "Come to Moscow. We can offer you a circumcision. I will recommend a doctor to carry out the operation in such a way nothing else will ever grow there again."
When the translation was released, European Union officials expressed their fury. In Russia it ruffled few feathers.
In recent history, the Kremlin has not been blessed with great orators. Joseph Stalin, who had a gruff Georgian accent, was repetitive and uninspiring. Leonid Brezhnev was interminably hard on the ear, especially after his first stroke. Mikhail Gorbachev spoke bureaucratic, convoluted Russian. Boris Yeltsin's tone was annoyingly familiar and his words often slurred.
Mr Putin, by contrast, has shone.
"He is the first president we can call a professional public speaker," said Alexander Volkov, a linguistics lecturer at Moscow State University.
When the cameras stop rolling, Mr Putin is even reported to resort to mat, the bawdy and highly taboo domain of Russian invective that forms the mainstay of prison, military and teenage street slang.
According to the Russian writer Victor Erofeyev, Mr Putin told the veteran Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov: "We don't fucking need a military base in Cuba!"
Perhaps Mr Putin's vocabulary owes something to the example set by his hero, Peter the Great. Mr Erofeyev says that while decapitating rebellious Kremlin guards, Tsar Peter let out an immense stream of foul language, "a legendary tapestry of 74 words woven together by the force of his wrath".
Nevertheless the diminutive judo black-belt continues to quarry the mines of the vernacular with confidence.
At a recent meeting of leaders of the former Soviet states, he urged them to work harder and to stop "just chewing snot from one year to the next".
Haha! I love a straight talking man. I'll bet when he and the Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi get together, everyone has to cover their ears LOL
Gorbie's speeches would make Al Gore's seem interesting. Even though his speeches were interpreted, I could never make head nor tails about what he was talking about.
Gorbachev cited Lenin from 1922 in PERESTROIKA, saying that this new strategy of "apparent capitalism" was necessary to side step things for a while.
Tune in next decade.
This comes close ;-)
Not necessarily...
Condemning the shooting down of a light American aircraft by the Cuban airforce, former US Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, once declared that Cuba's Fidel Castro had "no cajones".What partly fascinated the world was the way she used a Spanish word, to refer to Castro. "Cajones", roughly translates to mean "balls" or testicles.
However, what was more significant was the way she boldly supported an outdated and irrelevant American policy towards Cuba. She knew where the US stood and made sure the world was reminded of it.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200310130350.html
I guess he swears like a sailor?
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