As many linguists have noted, there is no such thing as perfect synonymy. Any words deemed synonymous will always be distinguished by some subtlety of meaning, including stylistic differences.

An interesting case––though considered beyond the pale in polite speech––is the unique distinction in Russian between the two verbs meaning, on one hand, farting noiselessly (бздеть [bzdet’]) and making a sound during this action (пердеть [perdét’]). Y-H-B cannot think off any other language in which this distinction is extant.

Perhaps this is not so surprising, if one knows that Russian has among the world’s languages perhaps the richest profane vocabulary, for which there are two designations, both featuring the word/base for ‘mother’, viz. мат [mat] and матерщина [matershschína]. In fact, this sector is so rich in Russian that utterances utilizing profanity have come to be differentiated by so-called “stories/floors (R этáж),” so that, for instance, speech studded with numerous and elaborate swear words is called семиэтажная брань ‘seven-story swearing’.

There is an anecdote (related to me by my oldest brother Joseph [1926-2004], who lived for many years in post-war Russia [mostly the USSR] and was employed in different species of work, incl. a railroad-car factory in Nizhny Tagil) that Stalin once tried to ban all profanity from the workplace, but this edict had the unintended consequence of slowing down production and had ultimately to be rescinded. The reason was that workers who were used to calling out objects in the production line by their profane names––the word for penis, R хуй, being the most frequent––had to stop to search for a non-profane term before proceeding. Incidentally, this one item of the Russian profane vocabulary even has the distinction of having an entire dictionary devoted to its array of uses.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO