Word: yolki
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...pilots closed in on the fated airliner, he is quoted as exclaiming, "Fiddlesticks!" Fiddlesticks? Despite the fact that the word went out of fashion before Yuri Andropov could even have heard of Glenn Miller, it is a remarkably apt translation of the Russian. What the pilot said was "Yolki palki," an exceedingly mild oath that translates literally as "the sticks of a fir tree," and is the exclamatory equivalent of "Yipes!" on a preteen U.S. playground...
...sale throughout Moscow were 325,000 freshly cut Siberian fir yolki (formerly Christmas but now New Year's trees), plus another 100,000 artificial trees and 200 boxcars of tinsel, lights and colored balls. Lavishly decorated trees appeared by the hundreds in restaurants, shops, public buildings and even in the Kremlin's Tainitsky Garden. State stores advertised "everything for the New Year's tree." On the streets, resplendent in long white beards and bright red suits, dozens of Grandfather Frosts exacted kopeks from the crowds...
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