Breakthrough

Since the days of yore in Irkutsk we have been hounded by one very strange English saying. Since then, and to this day, occasionally we will ask Russians in English, “How are you?” One of the responses we often hear is, “well…ummm….fifty fifty.” I’ve heard it so many times, especially from my younger students, that I sometimes use it accidently myself. “How am I today? Well….fifty fifty.”

Though the response has often amused me, I’ve never corrected it seeing as other mistakes take precedence and it is, after all, understandable.

A few weeks ago, though, Sarah and I were sitting at our kitchen table, over a bottle of Soviet champagne, listing the various contexts we’ve heard this peculiar “fifty fifty.” (NB It’s even funnier when said in a Russian accent: “Feefty feefty.”) I said, “Well, you know, I always want to correct my students on this particular point, but I never quite know what to tell them to say instead.” Sarah suggested various options, including “ok” and “not bad.” Then it struck her, “Oh, we say ‘so-so.’”

As the words settled, I suddenly screamed with revelation. “Give me a piece of paper and a pen!” As I bent over to write, Sarah immediately grasped my intention.

Here Nabokov would add in a little something like this: ‘Yes you, gentle reader, have long ago guessed what was to come.” Or, in his own words: "Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy!"

And so, my few but loyal readers: have you long ago guessed what I wrote down on that sheet of paper? I wrote “so-so” and underneath I wrote “50-50”, and we stood back hooted and hawed at how similar the two looked.

I have since regaled most of my adult students with our new theory: A long long time ago, in a small small Russian village, a lone English teacher taught her students to say “so-so” when asked how they were doing. Her students, rebellious and distracted as they were, did not hear their teacher’s words, and only quickly noted “50-50” in their notebooks. From this moment on, “feefty-feefty” has been a phrase passed on along the generations, slowly spreading through Russia and infiltrating each and every English classroom.

Sarah and I experienced something of what the scientist must feel after hitting upon a successful chemical equation. When our laughter finally abated, we acknowledged that we might live the rest of our lives without stumbling upon something quite so magnificent. What it lacks in likelihood it more than makes up for in brilliant logic.