the Common Place

Language Log’s Barbara Partee writes about a new kind of Internet slang born from switching back and forth between international character sets when keyboarding:

I have a Live Journal account where my “friends” are mainly young Russian linguists, so most of the posts are in Russian, in the Cyrillic alphabet, but user-names, tags, etc., are all in the Roman alphabet. There was one tag that I had often seen in one particular user’s posts, “lytdybr”, and I had just guessed that it was some private code word of her own (I even invented a romantic etymology for it as an abbreviation starting with “love you”.) But then last week I suddenly saw the same tag on a post by another young Russian linguist, and realized that it wasn’t just one person’s private tag.

So I googled it and discovered what it really is: it’s how the Russian word дневник, dnevnik ‘diary’, comes out if you’re typing on a QWERTY keyboard with the keystrokes you would use on a Cyrillic keyboard. There’s a Wiktionary entry about it; and I didn’t even know such a category of — of what? I guess I’ll call it slang — existed.

So on my LJ, I asked if there were any other examples, and it generated some interesting discussion. One person told me about usus for гыгы (gygy ‘laughter’ — think hee-hee); someone remarked that the “usus” of usus is fun in itself. Another example is ghbdtn, which is привет, privet ‘hi’ or ‘greetings’, common in instant messaging, with ICQ, Google Talk, etc.

One common example goes in the other direction: Russians typing in Cyrillic often use З.Ы. for P.S. so as not to have to switch out of the Russian keyboard. And one person told me they even sometimes use Ж-) instead of : -) for the same reason!

The phenomenon even has an example in contemporary fiction. In one of Boris Akunin’s detective novels (set in Imperial Russia and featuring the Byronic detective hero Erast Fandorin) there is an English character named Фрейби (freyby). Freyby is what you get if you type Акунин (Akunin) on a QWERTY keyboard.

lytdybr/лытдыбр has also acquired a specific meaning relating to blogging, as Partee explains.

One of my students commented that lytdybr, even sometimes transliterated back to лытдыбр, has become a word of its own, with a meaning more specific than the original ‘diary’.

It is often (but not always, there is a neutral meaning too) used to tag posts in blogs that are nothing more than boring retelling of author’s life. For example, something like “Just eaten some apples. Cool.” is a typical lytdybr in its negative meaning.

I am still working out what sort of posts will go here in my commonplace book - there may even be some reshuffling in the near future. However, I sincerely hope to keep the “lytdybr” type of post (in its negative meaning) to a minimum! Ж-)