The History of the Word Sandwich-Man (Chelovek-Sendwich)

The article examines the history of the compound noun chelovek-sendwich in the Russian language from the19th to the 21st century. This word denotes a special type of mobile advertising that became widespread in Europe and the United States. It entered the Russian language as a lexical calque from English via French and was used in mass-circulation newspapers. The word attracted the attention of authors of physiological essays. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the word exhibited phonetic and graphic variants: chelovek-sandwich (the more frequent form, later used in the Russian émigré press) and chelovek-sendwich. Using the material from newspaper feuilletons of the early 20th century, the article demonstrates how the new concept was assimilated: journalists sought social analogies for the chelovek-sandwich in the context of Russian reality. In the language of the Soviet press, the word chelovek-sendwich once again acquired the status of a word designation for an ideologically alien reality. The diversity of advertising forms that reemerged in Russia in the 90s led to the repeated borrowing of the concept, as a result of which the expression sandwich man acquired a number of synonyms: sendwichman, promo-sendwich, chelovek-buterbrod. The article also studies grammatical fluctuations related to animacy and plural formation that accompanied the history of the word in the Russian language.