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When the emphasis is on being cheap and greedy, there are lots of possibilities: Не будь жлобом - купи жене шубу (Don’t be a cheapskate - buy your wife a fur coat). But that’s just me, and it's not always the best translation. Next question: what’s the best translation? In my idiolect, I’d call this kind of person a cretin, especially because being cheap or shortchanging someone is definitely cretinous behavior. These former prisoners brought their various understandings of жлоб with them - and they now make up the modern definition of жлоб: a big, strong, cheap man who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. So, all these various definitions of жлоб in various camps left the camps when the men were released. It turns out that жмот is also camp slang. In other prisons and other times, it meant a villager, peasant worker a cheap person and a tall and strong man. In prison, Gorodin writes, жлоб was a prisoner who was not a member of a band and did not understand camp life. So, I did what I always do when all else fails: Get out the Gorodin Dictionary of prison and camp language and slang. Now this sounds possible, if only because English words for being cheap are also connected to this image: penny-pincher, tight, tight-fisted.īut I still could not find anything more than speculation.
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Yet another armchair etymologist maintained that жлоб, like the word жадина (greedy person) and another handful of words such as жмот (a cheapskate), all come from the verb жмать, a dialectical form of жать (to squeeze, hold tightly, wring, reap) and жаться (to be stingy). It came to Yiddish from the Slavic languages, not the other way around. So, I checked in my Yiddish-English dictionary… and found it: Zhlob or zhlub: an oaf, yokel, bumpkin an ill-mannered person a clumsy, graceless person. But I can’t find confirmation.īut any word of undetermined origin in Polish, Ukrainian, “Odessan” and Russian always makes me think of Yiddish. I suppose a wooden trough could be a metaphor for a thick dimwit.
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Not feeling the cretin vibe here.Īnother source gives the slang meaning of żłób as a blockhead, clod, or dimwit. The Russian cognate жёлоб is a gutter, channel or furrow. But I did find the Polish word żłób, which means a crib, a manger, a trough for horses and cattle. I have a bit of Ukrainian and about 15 words of Polish, most of them names of food. The problem is that none of these commentators apparently spoke Ukrainian or Polish. One person indignantly claimed it was a Ukrainian word that had appeared from Polish in the 15th century. This seemed like a big stretch to me, especially because I can’t think why the hard “j” sound turned into zh and where that “l” came from.Ĭommentators on a language forum agreed. I first discovered that it was claimed by Odessans as derived from the English word “job.” In this version, it appeared when the Odessa port was being built and managed by English speakers, and somehow “job” meaning “work” morphed into “жлоб” meaning a “worker,” which then morphed into a worker from the village, a boor, a rube. To come up with the best translation, I thought I ought to find out where the word came from. Basically, you don’t want to be called a жлоб. “More or less” because the more people I asked, the more variations I got, although they all involved unpleasant, coarse and usually cheap people. This week I stumbled upon one of those language questions that send me down the rabbit hole for days: How do you translate the word жлоб into English?