I read a tweet today that described a Russian politician as a “гопник”. I didn’t learn that word in school, so I looked it up in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary app. It was happy to tell me that the word means “yob” or “yobbo”.
Great.
What does that mean? It’s some kind of Brit slang that autocorrect won’t even let me type.
Brain wave: there’s a Robert/Collins French-English dictionary on the shelf that annoys me with the same stunt. Look up “yob” in there and find out it means loubard.
You can’t hang around a Parisian train station for long without meeting a loubard, so I’m all set. The Russian guy was a thug. But this episode has made me understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages.
Daniel Stride
A yob is a slang term for an uncultured and aggressive swine.
(Metaphorical swine, not literal swine).
Joe
There we go — beyond the contribution of the two dictionaries, essential connotations are provided via a network that reaches halfway around the globe in the opposite direction.