Шито белыми нитками
: obviously false, poorly disguised, trumped up
The other day I realized that I’d crossed the line from being a person with old fogey-ish tendencies to being a charter member of the Old Fogey Club. I’ve started saying things like, “Young people these days!” and lamenting that our
общее культурное наследство (common cultural heritage) is being lost. I mean, who knows the ancient Greek myths or the Bible anymore?
My rant was occasioned by the phrase
нить Ариадны (Ariadne’s thread), which several otherwise well-educated young people could vaguely define but not identify beyond a dim recollection of some Greek myth.
Argh. Remember Ariadne giving Theseus a ball of string when he went into the Minotaur’s labyrinth?
In Russian, the phrase means a key to understanding something complex — something that offers a way out of a dilemma.
I’ve come across the phrase in newspaper headlines that promise to deliver readers from the darkness of their ignorance, such as:
“Нить Ариадны из лабиринта статистики”
(“Following Ariadne’s Thread out of the Statistical Labyrinth”).
Actually, нить (thread) is definitely a neat word. (Sorry, I just can’t resist those bilingual puns.)
For example, when you go on a rant and get so caught up in your righteous indignation that you forget what you and your friend were discussing, you can say:
Простите! Потерял нить разговора (Sorry! I lost the thread of our conversation.)
Or when you finally haul the last of your ex-boyfriend’s junk out to the trash container, you can sigh melodramatically:
Порвала последнюю нить (I cut the last tie).
If someone robs you of everything, you might say:
Ободрали меня до нитки! (They robbed me blind; literally, “they stripped me down to the [last] thread”).
До нитки (to the [last] thread) can also be used when you get drenched by rain:
Я промок до нитки (I was soaked to the skin).
I’m also fond of the expression
с миру по нитке — голому рубаха
(literally, if you take a thread from everyone in the village, a poor man will get a shirt). In English, we’d probably say, “Every little bit adds up.”
Another useful phrase is на живую нитку, said of something executed quickly and poorly.
Here живой (living, live) has the sense of something unstable or temporary, and the image is of a garment tacked together in haste.
У нас какая-то стабильность выстроилась, но она хилая и неустойчивая, сшитая на живую нитку
(We have some kind of stability, but it’s weak and unstable, just basted together).
With Russian thread expressions, color matters.
Шито белыми нитками (literally, sewn with white thread) refers to the white thread used for basting.
The expression is a calque from the French and refers to something that is supposedly hidden, but obvious nonetheless. It is frequently used to describe trumped up legal charges.
Обвинение бездоказательное и шито белыми нитками (The accusation is without evidence and obviously false).
But the expression проходить красной нитью (to go through something like a red thread) refers to a common thread running through something.
В книге красной нитью проходит тема будущего России
(Russia’s future is the leitmotif of the book). Some etymologists think this expression came to Russian via a translation of Goethe. Others cite the red thread woven in British navy ropes to keep them from being stolen. Sill others cite Biblical passages.
I don’t know who is right, but I know it’s not a reference to an album by Cher.
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter.