Poleznaya Dryan’ (‘Useful Rubbish’) and Tsennaya Fignya (‘Valuable Garbage’). On Some Cases of Changing the Assessment in Informal Colloquial Speech

СThe paper examines the group of nouns with evaluative meaning
that are widely used in informal oral and written speech to reference a wide
range of entities, such as objects, people and situations: barakhlo, beliberda,
galimat’ja, gluposti, govno, der’mo, drebeden’, drian’, erunda, labuda, mura,
mut’, mutoten’, fi gnia, khlam, khren’, chepuha, etc. (meaning ‘rubbish’, ‘junk’,
‘crap’, ‘rubbish’, ‘idiocy’, ‘fi lth’ etc.). The meanings of these words in normative
explanatory dictionaries are compared to the interpretations provided
by the Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Colloquial Speech (EDRC). As illustrated
by examples from colloquial speech and blogs, these words may be
used in neutral and even positive contexts.
Neutral usage is often observed when such a nown is used in a substantive
sense that is absent from normative dictionaries but covered by the
EDRC (e.g. HREN’. 1. DEF. on any object or substance the name of which
the speaker has forgotten or is unwilling to use for some reason ...). The
assessment shift is also supported by adjectives with positive semantics
(classnyj, dorogoj, tsennyj, poleznyj) appearing next to such nouns: tsennaja
hren’, poleznaja fi gnya, nuzhnaja erunda (valuable stuff, useful thingy, helpful
trash) etc. However, such collocations may also indicate combinations of
two different viewpoints: an objective assessment and a subjective opinion
of the speaker, — in such cases, the evaluative component is still preserved:
cf. dorogostojashhaja hren’, poleznaja gadost’, tsennyj hlam (‘expensive junk,
healthy crap, valuable garbage’) etc. The expressive nature of these words
does not disappear altogether but rather is transformed — instead of the
negative assessment it can mark the casualness of speech, express irony or
self-irony, characterize individual speech manner of the speaker.