To the History of a Phraseme Sing (Mother) Turnip

The article describes the history of a phraseme, Sing (mother) turnip, which has not yet found a satisfactory solution. The use of dialectal, ethnolinguistic and some other words made it possible to reconstruct the folk picture of the world, which reflects the national-cultural and historical consciousness of the Russian people. The phraseological unit Sing (Mother) Turnip contains a special cultural meaning associated with agrarian holidays, an indispensable obligatory part of which is a ritual. One of them is the wish for a harvest on Maslenitsa and some other Slavic holidays, when actions were accompanied by the singing of ritual songs, in the magical power of which the Russian people believed. This expression was used as a figurative expression “about a difficult, hopeless situation”. There was also a tradition of performing Maslenitsa dances and harvest calling dances, accompanied by songs of erotic content, which strengthened the productive function of a dance. Some of those folklore songs contained obscene language. So, we can see the other meaning of the phraseological unit Sing (Mother) Turnip — ‘no matter what you do, no matter what you ask — it won’t help’, which V. I. Dahl associated with an obscene song about a turnip.