From ‘Violent Tenth’ to ‘Obese Zeros’: the Epithets to Denote the Ten-year Periods in the History of our Country

The article deals with a fragment of the modern Russian linguistic world image — the epithets to denote the ten-year periods in the history of our country over the past hundred years. The investigation of frequency, semantics, formation of these adjectives as epithets allows, on the one hand, to draw conclusions about the functioning of various qualitative and relative adjectives in Russian, and on the other hand, to analyze the subjective perception of time and history in different epochs (see frivolous seventies, deaf eighties, obese zeros). The history of fixed expressions сороковые роковые (‘fatal forties’) and лихие девяностые (‘dashing nineties’) is considered in detail.