Editorial warning: "The author of the following has been known to find potty humor highly amusing. Having attained to an illustrious age, she is thinking that she will perhaps never grow out of this childish behavior. Her father has been heard to sigh and tell her to elevate the conversation."
While talking to my brother about the hilarity of the Fart Auto sign(four posts down), the dictionary of random words in his head opened up and I found out that "Fart" actually has the following meaning in Russian:
фартовый:
*Такой, которому везет, сопутствует удача.
Fartovi:(adjective)
*one who is lucky, attendant to success, good luck
Now, keeping in mind that I have a poor sense of humor and that one of the families with which I work has three teenage boys also studying Russian, you begin to get a glimpse into our ride home from bible study the other night. As we attempted to explain to our Ukrainian co-workers why the sign was so hilarious, the six of us started creating our own usages of this word that went something like this:
adj.: Ты фартовая! Literally:You're lucky! Our def.: You're farty!
verb: Тебе нужно фартовать? Lit: It is necessary for you to luck? (you can figure out our translation)
noun:Мне нравиться фарты. Lit: To me lucks are pleasing/I like lucks(I'm sure you're catching on to what our def. was)
Needless to say, the ride home was a little raucous and we all got our fill of laughter for the day. The most amusing part of this is that people here tend to equate printed English with classiness. If you have a sign in English, you are a world-class business. In this case, however, they have no clue that their literal transliteration of "Lucky Auto" brings a completely different, utterly hilarious and oh, so unclassy meaning to their business. You've got to love it.
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