The name for a hooded coat, a parka, is often lined with fur and designed for particularly frigid weather, comes from Nenets, the name of both an ethnic group from Arctic Russia and the language they speak. The word literally translates as “skin coat” because parkas were traditionally made from animal skins and lined with animal fur. The ones you buy from The North Face or L.L. Bean are more likely to use synthetic fabrics and faux fur.
If you’re not much of a gambler, th word vigorish might not seem very common to you. The vigorish, often abbreviated as the vig, is the charge that a bookie or gambling house takes for placing a bet for you. It comes from either the Ukrainian vygrash or Russian vyigrysh, both of which mean “winnings, profit.” And from a bookie’s point of view, that’s exactly what it is — the profit they make whether your bet wins or loses.
Mammoth appears to have taken a journey through Dutch before arriving in English, but there is some controversy over exactly what route it took. Dutch merchants and ambassadors at the end of the 17th century learned that, along coasts and rivers in northern Asia, gigantic tusks were sometimes uncovered. In their reports, they noted that the tusks were called mammouttekoos, koos meaning “bone” and mammout meaning “a large, terrible beast.”
Again, because this is a transliteration (of a language that itself has shifted, no less), the word can be found written, in various places and at various times, as mamant, mamont, mammout, mammut, and mammuth, the last of which found its way into English translations, ultimately becoming mammoth.
One of the most expensive foods on the planet by weight is beluga caviar, the roe (eggs) of the beluga sturgeon, a large white fish found in the Caspian and Black Seas and their tributaries. Early Russian fishers named the fish beluga based entirely on its appearance: The word comes from belyĭ “white” plus -uga, a suffix that augments the base word, like the prefix super- in superstar or mega- in megastore. Beluga essentially translates to “great white.”
The term was later applied to a species of white Arctic whale. A beluga whale is literally a “great white whale,” which I imagine causes problems for translators preparing Russian editions of Moby-Dick. That title character, often referred to in the novel as the White Whale, was a sperm whale, not a beluga.
The Molotov Cocktail (A bottle filled with petrol or other liquid fuel, with a piece of cloth on its top, that is set on fire and thrown) was invented by the Finns in 1939, when Soviet forces were bombing their country in the lead-up to the Winter War. The Finns named the bomb after Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, poking fun at his declaration that the bombardment of Helsinki was an airborne humanitarian food delivery. The bomb was even given the following tag-line by Finnish soldiers- ‘a drink to go with his food parcels.’