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[Content advisory (she said belatedly): *points upward to the title* Swearing.]
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0.
As I said before, my approach to understanding geopolitics is substantially informed by being an early musician. So in my capacity as something of a music historian, I must share with you the following.
In 2014, Ukrainian people, enraged by the invasion of Crimea, managed to absolutely weld together the words "Putin" ("Пу́тін" in Ukrainian, "Пу́тин" in Russian) and a word we might for the moment translate as "dickhead", which conveniently is the same word across Ukrainian and Russian, "хуйло́", which we could tranliterate as "khuylo".
They gave birth to the expression "Пу́тин хуйло́": Putin khuylo.
The word "хуйло́", which comes from "хуй", "dick", is a much, much more vulgar word in Russian and Ukrainian than "dick" is in English. I gather it is even worse than "cunt" in the US, for obscenity. It is described in a Radio Free Europe article as "the kh-bomb", as in "dropping the kh-bomb".
In truth, from my research into this matter, I have come to the considered opinion that it might not be possible to truly translate "khuylo" into English, because we simply do not have that register of vulgarity. I gather from what I have read that there is simply no word in English that is quite that obscene. We have words which are taboo to use, but for other reasons than their obscenity, such as racial epithets. There simply aren't any words which are shocking purely in their profaneness. Not any more. We have worn our profanities smooth with frequent use. (Personally, I don't think that's a bad thing.)
"Khuylo" does not literally mean "dickhead", but since it (I gather) does literally mean "one who is entirely characterized as being like unto a penis", "dickhead" is widely agreed upon as the correct translation of "khuylo" into English. (See also "schmuck", Yiddish; and the English "shithead".) Sometimes it is also translated "fucker", I think because that is a better representation of its level of vulgarity, and also maybe because it idiomatically does(?) mean "fucker", as per the Russian "иди на хуй", which is literally "go at [a] dick", but idiomatically "go fuck yourself", as per, "Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй" ("'Russian warship, go fuck yourself'").
Both words "Putin" and "khuylo" are nouns. In both Russian and Ukrainian, when you just stick two nouns together, that can be a complete sentence, because in the present tense one omits the word "to be". It is understood. When a spoken sentence no verb, it "to be". In writing, per RussianTutoring.com:
Hence "Putin khuylo" (or, in writing, "Putin – khuylo") is a complete sentence: "Putin [is] [a] dickhead."
1.
The Ukrainians turned "Putin khuylo" into a slogan, a meme, an idiom. And maybe something more.
This expressive turn of phrase arose out of the rich musical traditions of Ukrainian football hooligans. In March of 2014, a group of ultrafans – "ultras" is apparently a technical term in football – of the Kyiv Dynamos football team took to the streets of Kharkiv chanting a new version of an older chant. According to Wikipedia, the song was previously used by Kharkiv Metalist ultrafans to call the Football Federation's president a dickhead. But then Putin invaded Crimea in Feb 2014 and the ultras in Kharkiv repurposed the chant, giving Ukraine, and the world "Putin Khuylo". Here is the video from March 30, 2014, that allegedly is the "Putin – Dickhead" heard 'round the world:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApNCSQpYxAc)
And here it is two weeks later on April 16, 2014, at the the Kyiv Dynamos vs Donetsk Shakhtars game in Kyiv:
("Путин - хλйло на НСК Олімпійському | Динамо-Шахтар 16.04.2014" ("Putin – huylo at the NSC Olimpiyskiy stadium in Kyiv") on Youtube)
(Alas, this is not the moment of political harmony it first appears. This article in the Guardian suggests that Donetsk footy ultras are generally pro-Ukraine, not separatists.)
Regarding the tune, the Wikipedia page on "Putin khuylo!" claims that one scholar has identified the origin of the melody as the 1962 American song "Speedy Gonzales" by Pat Boone. The route of transmission is unclear, and presumably has something to do with Ukrainian warriors bringing it back from fighting in the Middle East. (Ha, ha, little music historian joke.)
This chant, the entirety of the lyrics of which are "Putin Khuylo, la la la la la la la" ("Путін - хуйло! ла-ла-ла-ла-ла-ла-лаааа", thank you, user Yaroosique of Urban Dictionary for sharing your "Ukrainian national patriotic song" with the Anglosphere) promptly took off throughout Ukraine.
2.
How viral did it go?
Well, there was the time in 2014 the then-Minister of Internal Affairs meeting with the troops of the Kyiv-1 Special Police force battalion, shouted as is customary (and at this point you've presumably seen this a thousand times and don't need translation) "Slava Ykraini!" and they shouted back as is customary "Geroyam slava!" and then he shouted "Putin!" and they shouted "Khuylo!"
There was the time that then-acting Minister of Foreign Affairs (a month earlier) got caught on video trying to talk protesters out of attacking the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, saying them, "Yes, Putin is a khuylo, but please disperse", and he may or may not have lost his position due to it (the Ukrainian government swears the change over was already in the works before this happened), as it precipitated an international scandal. (More on which below.)
There was the time back when President Zelenskyy was merely playing the president of Ukraine in a comedy show, in Dec 2019, there was a joke where his character was told that Putin wore a Hublo brand watch, and he responded, "Putin Hublo?" ("Путин — хубло?").
The version that aired in central Russia did, uh, not include that joke.
There's the fact that today when you type "Putin" into Wikipedia's search, the third autocomplete is "khuylo!". Yes, there is a page on English Wikipedia for "Putin khuylo!" – it is my source for these three anecdotes.
It went so viral, that, I am reliably informed (RadioFreeEurope, funded by the US), any Ukrainian will recognize singing the "la-la la-la la-la la" part, or even just humming the tune, or even just writing "la-la la-la la-la la", as an expression of the sentiment: "Putin: Dickhead".
3.
There were memes of course:
(The little "ла ла ла"s top and bottom just slay me.)
(The caption is "Will you spin the wheel or are you ready to guess?")
These are from the trove of examples from this page from May 2014. Also included are videos of a mariachi version (sic!) from Los Angeles, and what seems to be trying to be a tango version from allegedly Japan. It also links to on-demand merch ("Keep Calm and Putin Huylo" and the inspired variant, a "H*ilo Putty" spoof of "Hello Kitty"). The ring tones and a number of the videos have long since been taken down, alas.
4.
I mentioned previously that modern Ukrainians are the descendents in some sense of the Cossacks, as their national anthem alludes. If you look at the Cossacks page on English Wikipedia, you will see in the upper right corner, where usually Wikipedia has the emblem of the people under discussion, instead, it has a thumbnail of a painting.
The painting that Wikipedians have decided to use to represent the Cossacks is the famous Ilya Repin painting, "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Sultan of Turkey" (Запорожцы пишут письмо турецкому султану). It shows a bunch of rough and barbarous men all looking very uproariously merry and pleased with themselves, gathered around a scribe writing something with a quill pen. It is an imagined image of an alleged historical event, in 1676. I'm not sure why the wikipedia page on the painting says that the event was legendary, as, apparently, we think we actually have the full texts of the two letters in question, first the letter of the Sultan Mehmed IV to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, telling them "I command you, the Zaporogian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, and to desist from troubling me with your attacks", and – this being why even if this event isn't mere legendary, it is legend – the Zaporozhian Cossaks' reply to the Sultan, which opens:megpie71 shares with us a dramatic reading, in English translation by Peter Capaldi [YouTube]. Alas, approaching it in translation, we apparently lose some of its magisterial artistry: I gather the original is in rhyming couplets.
With all the foregoing explained, you are now prepared to behold the following meme from 2014:
5.
Now, you may be wondering how to say "Putin khuylo" yourself, or you may be squinting at one of the videos above thinking, "Are they saying 'Putin, hello'?"
Wikipedia:
The initial "kh" is pronounced like the ch in "Bach" and "loch". The "uy" Wikipedia is saying is pronounced as "[ʊj]", which I attempted to search for guidance on, and found myself down an epic linguistic rabbit hole of how to pronounce "Uyghur" which was largely unhelpful because all the examples were in Flash which no longer runs. Recoursing to the primary source documents, these Kyiv Dynamos ultrafans (presumed inebriated) seem to my American ears to be saying "who low", with what we call a long "oo" sound ([ʉu̯]), while the ones in the top video above seem to me to be saying "hullo" with a short "u" as in "put".
PronounceKiwi, which has playable samples, gives it, in the Ukrainian, as like "oy" (as in "boy") only with a "u" (as in "put") sound in the front, so kind of phonetically "uy". In the several Russian offerings, it sounds variously like "oo-ee" or "oo-eh" (short e, as in "bet") so it comes out "Putin Kylo" (as in Kylo Ren) or "Putin khwellah".
(Years ago someone told me that Muscovites pronounce the first "o" in any word they come to as "a" - is that what explains the "ah" sound at the end of "khuylo" in two of the Russian examples?)
Perhaps one of our Ukrainian or Russian speaking readers will further enlighten us.
6.
If Russia's leadership had had any sense of proportion whatsoever, a potty-mouthed insult for their president would not have been an international incident, but they didn't so it was.
I don't know how fast you can get a law passed in Russia, but that initial footy club video was from the end of March, and on May 5th, Russia criminalized swearing in the media.
2014 May 5: BBC: "Russian law bans swearing in arts and media":
The Teleri song "Putin Hello"? Came out the next day after this law was passed.
See the thing about Russia and Ukraine is that insofar as the the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was Russia, Ukraine was under Russian rule for decades and Russian language fluency is ubiquitous in Ukraine, and there has been a lot of cultural exchange between these two nations. Ukrainian media products were often made in Russian so that they could be marketed to Russian consumers as well as Ukrainian ones.
And, presumably, Ukrainian and Russian football teams played against one another. Russia definitely has football teams ("sides"?): they just got kicked out the World Cup by FIFA, which implies that the Russian people normally participate in the international sacrament of footy, so it seems supremely unlikely there aren't quite a number of Russians who have been acquainted with this shining star of Ukrainian cultural heritage through attending away games, if nothing else. I assume some games are broadcast to watch on TV or streamed on the internet. It seems impossible that Russians weren't getting exposed to the "Putin khuylo" meme, which might explain why Russia was suddenly in such a rush to ban swearing in the media.
7.
And if footy as a transnational cultural force wasn't enough to introduce the Russian public to the Ukrainian hit "Пу́тин хуйло́, ла ла ла ла ла ла ла", the response of Russian leadership (and others allied with them) and Russian media then pretty much guaranteed it.
Wikipedia: the Streisand Effect:
If Putin's (minion's) aim in passing an anti-swearing law was to suppress the spread of "Putin khuylo" – both the slogan and the song – then that law was rendered ineffectual before it even went into effect.
8.
"Putin khuylo!" continued to spread. In the section of the Wikipedia page deliciously titled "International Reception", it says:
Apparently, yes, "хуйло" is the same word in Belarusan, too.
9.
My first response to reading about Russian state and media's consternation about "Putin khuylo" was to assume, American that I am, that it was of a kind with what our Republican Party members do: put on a big sanctimonious act as to how aghast they are at any (alleged) peccadillo of their opponents without for a moment meaning it sincerely. It doesn't even rise to the level of hypocrisy: they're being deliberately and almost sarcastically mendacious, and don't for a moment mean anything they're saying. They're just doing it as a "gotcha".
But upon further reading, it gradually dawned on me: you know, I think the Russians might be serious.
I mean, not serious-serious, in a "'mlya' is okay but 'khuylo' is not" way, but actually seriously upset. I don't think they're upset at swearing.
Because you don't pass an obscenity law if you want to take a posture of being scandalized by the conduct of your opposition. No, you wag your fingers and cluck your tongue at your opposition, you don't make it so that the general public can't swear in media.
Looking at what I can see of what happened, I am suspicious that what really caused Russia's leadership to get enormously bent out of shape was, very specifically, "Putin khuylo". It sure seems to have gotten under their skin in a way I would not have imagined anything possibly could.
And by "Russia's leadership", I suspect I mean the khuylo, himself.
10.
If we grant that is true, then we might ask why Putin found it that provoking. I mean, he's a dictator. You don't go into the dictator business if you're afraid people won't like you and might say mean things about you, or even swear at you. It sure seems, at first blush, mighty thin-skinned of someone who arranges people's murders.
And I'm pretty sure the problem is not that Putin objects to the word "khuylo", per se. Reports, as per above, say he's foul-mouthed bastard himself.
And I don't even think he would object all that much to people calling him "khuylo" in any a number of scenarios. I can easily imagine him relishing it as an expression of helpless fury, emphasizing how utterly he had dominated an opponent or a people, and how futile their vulgar defiance.
But he apparently didn't. He didn't chuckle in malevolent satisfaction like the sociopathic mustache-twirling villain he is. It seems – if I may imagine this for you, extrapolating from what is visible – his blood ran cold and his nostrils flared and he got all "How Very Dare", and ordered his minions to put a stop to "Putin khuylo".
Isn't that interesting! Why should "Putin khuylo" be a bridge too far? I think I know.
12.
There is someone who went down in history as "Æthelred the Unready" and I'm pretty sure he wasn't okay with it. For the record, the name Æthelred means "well advised", while "unready" – "unræd" – meant in Old English "poorly advised" [W] which manages to be even funnier and more awful than one would glean from the modern sense of "unready". It's like a king named "Smart" getting the epithet "idiot", and going down in actual fucking history, for all eternity, as "King Smart the Idiot". It's not possible to regard that, and the fact that that was how resoundingly he was known, without smirking and sniggering a little. It is, as John Oliver once put it about something else, "objectively funny."
History is full of people – mostly, but not exclusively, men – who bethought themselves "great", yet found themselves saddled with an epithet not reflecting the grandeur they thought fitting. "Ivan the Boneless", "Vasily the Cross-eyed", "William the Bastard", "Władysław the Elbow-High", "Henry the Impotent", and my personal favorite, "Ivaylo the Cabbage" ("a Bulgarian farmer who led a peasants’ revolt in the late 13th century and proclaimed himself Emperor of Bulgaria in 1278. He was overthrown the following year and assassinated" [Source]) among many, many others.
I am pretty sure that Vladimir Putin thinks of himself as a great man. I'm pretty sure he thinks of himself as an emperor in all but name. And given all his shirtless photos, I think we can all safely assume he is exquisitely vain.
I now think the thing that has struck him to the quick is not merely that pissed off Ukrainians have used naughty words at him. I think it's because they managed to make "Putin"/"Dickhead" a call-and-response throughout their country and it's been spreading to other countries. I think it's because Ukrainians managed to make an meme of "Putin khuylo", and in doing so, what has coalesced from their usage is an epithet.
I think the Ukrainians have managed to, for want of a word, epithetize Putin.
After all, that is the other way that, grammatically, "Putin khuylo" works.
I said, above, there's a a grammatical ambiguity in this phrase, because there's no verb in there, and no article. Yes, by default, the way two nouns together in a phrase with nothing to intermediate them relate is with an implied "is". "Putin [is] [a] Khuylo".
But another way that that grammatical structure is used is in the epithets of monarchs. The woman we know as "Catherine the Great" is known in Russian as "Екатери́на Вели́кая", literally "Ekaterina [the] Great".
A better translation of "Putin Khuylo" thus might be the verbless phrase, "Putin the Dickhead".
Putin the Dickhead, exactly parallel to the old epithets of kings – the terms that boiled down their whole reigns to single-word verdicts of history upon them.
I propose that what has infuriated him, in short, is this:
(2014, source)
I think it is this – being epithetized as "Putin the Dickhead", such that he might go down in history, forever, as "Putin the Dickhead", or rather as "Putin the Like Unto a Penis", "Putin the Fucker", "Putin the Unprintable in This History Textbook", "Putin the Rudest Word in Three Languages" – has sent him into an utter rage.
Or put another way, this is what Putin fears:
That's a kinda random English-language (American? Bostonian?) Twitterer casually referring to Putin Khuylo in conversation on the open internet.
There's a witticism in the SCA: "Do not meddle in the affairs of bards for they are unsubtle and your name scans to Greensleeves". Well it would seem that is precisely what the Ukrainians actually did. Whether they had any intention to or whether it was an entirely emergent phenomenon, they actually carried out the implicit threat of that joke, to make immortal their mockery of an antagonist through song.
Which is, when you think of it, what the Zaporozhian Cossacks did to the Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey.
Cattle die and kinsmen die, yall, but wordfame is forever.
13.
There are many logical reasons Putin might have ordered the invasion of Ukraine. For instance, it's very economically productive and is a choice piece of real estate – what budding conqueror wouldn't want it? There's less logical reasons, more emotional in nature, that have been much discussed, such as a desire to Make Russia Great Again and reconquer all the USSR's old holdings, or maybe even believing his messianic narrative about saving the Russophones of Ukraine from the Nazis.
But then there's this.
Maybe – I know this is out there, but just maybe – Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine because of "Putin Khuylo". Maybe he did it out of outraged vanity and the fury of humiliation. Maybe this is all a narcissistic rage that the entirety of the Ukrainian people (and no few of their brethren in Belarus, Poland, and even Russia itself) have the insouciant audacity to know him as "Putin the Dickhead" and commend him so to history itself.
He does not expect to be loved by a people whose country he invaded in 2014, but he does expect to be feared. He expects their frightened deference. How dare they not be afraid of him! He feels entitled to their terror. He feels that they should be too scared of his might to speak so contemptuously of him! He is (he fancies) a mighty conqueror, after all, and the potentate of a great nation! How dare they mock him – were they to stand in Russia and say such things, he'd have them rounded up and arrested!
I hypothesize that he is outraged that he has cause to fear: fear for his legacy, fear for his fame, fear for his glory. The Ukrainians had been screwing it all up for him. They have snatched the halo from his head and tossed it in a toilet. He has been trying to prevent his epithetizing as "Putin the Dickhead" but he has had no leverage whatsoever to shut up the ultra-in-the-streets of Kharkiv. Sure, he could ban using the word "khuylo" in the Russian media, but that does nothing in Ukraine, in Belarus, in Poland, in any other country.
Maybe what's really going on is he's sent in the tanks to Ukraine to shut them all up, to terrorize them into shutting up or just killing them all so then they can't say anything.
This, I know, is a lot to attribute to any song, much less a song of three words chanted by sportsball fans.
But as hypotheses go, it has the advantage of explaining why everything about this invasion is so incredibly stupid. It being one big narcissistic tantrum explains why the invasion has been carried on so incompetently and with such little support, and it's why none of the rhetorical excuses given for the invasion make even the least sense.
If this is Putin on a butt-hurt personal vendetta, then he may have had to evade what little controls there are on the power of the president of Russia – he may have had to act precipitously and in secret from those who would have objected to his plan's lack of, well, plan, and he may have had to do without adequate funding given the lack of political support his whim had.
This being Putin just lashing out at the people of Ukraine would explain why his forces aren't even trying to keep to his "liberation" script, heading right to Kyiv and bombing indiscriminately. It might even explain why the forces he sent to Ukraine don't even really seem to know what their military objectives are, because, really, if Putin the Khuylo's real strategy is "conquer them, kill them, whatever, just make them stop saying that!", that's not actually an actionable military strategy.
14.
Speaking of the Streisand Effect, there was an absolutely 0% chance that I would ever have learned about the expression "Putin Khuylo", much less have written this entire essay for an English-speaking audience blithely unaware of it, had Putin Khuylo not invaded Ukraine. The only reason I am explaining this all to you now, and bequeathing upon you the knowledge of "Putin Khuylo" to carry forth into even more countries, is – I propose – because Putin is such a dumb fucking khuylo he invaded Ukraine over being called Putin Khuylo.
I am, of course, hardly the only person discovering Putin Khuylo. The chant and the epithet are exploding outward to more and more countries. Here it is appearing in anti-war protests and sporting events in:
Riga, Latvia, 2022 Feb 25
Kaunas, Lithuania, 2022 Feb 24 (I had not understood the Lithuanians were serious about basketball.) Another view
Tbilisi?, Georgia, 2022 Feb 24
Tbilisi, Georgia 2022 Feb 25
Tbilisi, Georgia, 2022 Feb 27 another view
Wrocław, Poland, 2022 Feb 24
Krakow, Poland, 2022 Feb 24
Paphos, Cyprus, 2022 Feb 28
And, perhaps most touchingly, here's a little pro-Ukraine protest in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, 2022 Feb 24. "Also chants of “Putin Khuylo!” which translates to 'Putin is a dickhead.' I’m told this is a common chant." writes @NickdelaCanal.
I do not know what the status of the expression "Putin khuylo" is in Russia, itself, but hackers compromised gas station pumps to display "PUTIN XUJLO!" on their readouts - here's a photo, 2022 Feb 28.
On the birb site, the hashtags #PutinKhuylo and #putinhuilo were very active when last I checked earlier this month. (Content warning: one of the things that inclines one to tag something #PutinKhuilo are images and video of war crimes. For some reason, more violent content seems more common on #putinhuilo than #PutinKhuylo.)
15.
And now, you, too know about Putin Khuylo.
Pass it on.
Loose change:
Pravda Brewery, in Lviv, cut over from brewing beer to making molotov cocktails. They're still printing labeles for their bottles though. They have special labels for the occasion. (Zoom in.)
One of my sources has been 2014 May 10: MaindanTranslations.com / Voices of Ukrain: "The Etymology of the Word: “Huylo” (as in “Putin Huylo”)" by Svtlana Fokina. It has further info.
2022 Feb 27: VAHASTU. MVH /@Vahastu on Twitter": "Putin logging into Twitter after a pretty shitty day at work just to see half of europe can now Call him dickhead in ukrainian. #PutinKhuylo MVH"
The English Wikipedia page on "Putin khuylo!" is another source I used, and has further information. It also has sheet music.
If you stick various spellings of "Putin khuylo" into YouTube, you will turn up various popular songs that use it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dAYKtP_xLM. Note: this may do interesting things to your YouTube recommendations if you do it signed in.
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[Content advisory (she said belatedly): *points upward to the title* Swearing.]
[Content advisory: video and image embeds, may tax slow browers. Supplementary illustrations, not required to access the post.]
0.
As I said before, my approach to understanding geopolitics is substantially informed by being an early musician. So in my capacity as something of a music historian, I must share with you the following.
In 2014, Ukrainian people, enraged by the invasion of Crimea, managed to absolutely weld together the words "Putin" ("Пу́тін" in Ukrainian, "Пу́тин" in Russian) and a word we might for the moment translate as "dickhead", which conveniently is the same word across Ukrainian and Russian, "хуйло́", which we could tranliterate as "khuylo".
They gave birth to the expression "Пу́тин хуйло́": Putin khuylo.
The word "хуйло́", which comes from "хуй", "dick", is a much, much more vulgar word in Russian and Ukrainian than "dick" is in English. I gather it is even worse than "cunt" in the US, for obscenity. It is described in a Radio Free Europe article as "the kh-bomb", as in "dropping the kh-bomb".
In truth, from my research into this matter, I have come to the considered opinion that it might not be possible to truly translate "khuylo" into English, because we simply do not have that register of vulgarity. I gather from what I have read that there is simply no word in English that is quite that obscene. We have words which are taboo to use, but for other reasons than their obscenity, such as racial epithets. There simply aren't any words which are shocking purely in their profaneness. Not any more. We have worn our profanities smooth with frequent use. (Personally, I don't think that's a bad thing.)
"Khuylo" does not literally mean "dickhead", but since it (I gather) does literally mean "one who is entirely characterized as being like unto a penis", "dickhead" is widely agreed upon as the correct translation of "khuylo" into English. (See also "schmuck", Yiddish; and the English "shithead".) Sometimes it is also translated "fucker", I think because that is a better representation of its level of vulgarity, and also maybe because it idiomatically does(?) mean "fucker", as per the Russian "иди на хуй", which is literally "go at [a] dick", but idiomatically "go fuck yourself", as per, "Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй" ("'Russian warship, go fuck yourself'").
Both words "Putin" and "khuylo" are nouns. In both Russian and Ukrainian, when you just stick two nouns together, that can be a complete sentence, because in the present tense one omits the word "to be". It is understood. When a spoken sentence no verb, it "to be". In writing, per RussianTutoring.com:
We use the hyphen when the subject and the predicate are the same part of speech, for example, in the case of nouns.Also – this is about to be pertinent – neither language has the articles "the" and "a".
• Солнце - звезда. (Solntse - zvezda).
• The Sun is a star.
Hence "Putin khuylo" (or, in writing, "Putin – khuylo") is a complete sentence: "Putin [is] [a] dickhead."
1.
The Ukrainians turned "Putin khuylo" into a slogan, a meme, an idiom. And maybe something more.
This expressive turn of phrase arose out of the rich musical traditions of Ukrainian football hooligans. In March of 2014, a group of ultrafans – "ultras" is apparently a technical term in football – of the Kyiv Dynamos football team took to the streets of Kharkiv chanting a new version of an older chant. According to Wikipedia, the song was previously used by Kharkiv Metalist ultrafans to call the Football Federation's president a dickhead. But then Putin invaded Crimea in Feb 2014 and the ultras in Kharkiv repurposed the chant, giving Ukraine, and the world "Putin Khuylo". Here is the video from March 30, 2014, that allegedly is the "Putin – Dickhead" heard 'round the world:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApNCSQpYxAc)
And here it is two weeks later on April 16, 2014, at the the Kyiv Dynamos vs Donetsk Shakhtars game in Kyiv:
("Путин - хλйло на НСК Олімпійському | Динамо-Шахтар 16.04.2014" ("Putin – huylo at the NSC Olimpiyskiy stadium in Kyiv") on Youtube)
(Alas, this is not the moment of political harmony it first appears. This article in the Guardian suggests that Donetsk footy ultras are generally pro-Ukraine, not separatists.)
Regarding the tune, the Wikipedia page on "Putin khuylo!" claims that one scholar has identified the origin of the melody as the 1962 American song "Speedy Gonzales" by Pat Boone. The route of transmission is unclear, and presumably has something to do with Ukrainian warriors bringing it back from fighting in the Middle East. (Ha, ha, little music historian joke.)
This chant, the entirety of the lyrics of which are "Putin Khuylo, la la la la la la la" ("Путін - хуйло! ла-ла-ла-ла-ла-ла-лаааа", thank you, user Yaroosique of Urban Dictionary for sharing your "Ukrainian national patriotic song" with the Anglosphere) promptly took off throughout Ukraine.
2.
How viral did it go?
Well, there was the time in 2014 the then-Minister of Internal Affairs meeting with the troops of the Kyiv-1 Special Police force battalion, shouted as is customary (and at this point you've presumably seen this a thousand times and don't need translation) "Slava Ykraini!" and they shouted back as is customary "Geroyam slava!" and then he shouted "Putin!" and they shouted "Khuylo!"
There was the time that then-acting Minister of Foreign Affairs (a month earlier) got caught on video trying to talk protesters out of attacking the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, saying them, "Yes, Putin is a khuylo, but please disperse", and he may or may not have lost his position due to it (the Ukrainian government swears the change over was already in the works before this happened), as it precipitated an international scandal. (More on which below.)
There was the time back when President Zelenskyy was merely playing the president of Ukraine in a comedy show, in Dec 2019, there was a joke where his character was told that Putin wore a Hublo brand watch, and he responded, "Putin Hublo?" ("Путин — хубло?").
The version that aired in central Russia did, uh, not include that joke.
There's the fact that today when you type "Putin" into Wikipedia's search, the third autocomplete is "khuylo!". Yes, there is a page on English Wikipedia for "Putin khuylo!" – it is my source for these three anecdotes.
It went so viral, that, I am reliably informed (RadioFreeEurope, funded by the US), any Ukrainian will recognize singing the "la-la la-la la-la la" part, or even just humming the tune, or even just writing "la-la la-la la-la la", as an expression of the sentiment: "Putin: Dickhead".
3.
There were memes of course:
(The little "ла ла ла"s top and bottom just slay me.)
(The caption is "Will you spin the wheel or are you ready to guess?")
These are from the trove of examples from this page from May 2014. Also included are videos of a mariachi version (sic!) from Los Angeles, and what seems to be trying to be a tango version from allegedly Japan. It also links to on-demand merch ("Keep Calm and Putin Huylo" and the inspired variant, a "H*ilo Putty" spoof of "Hello Kitty"). The ring tones and a number of the videos have long since been taken down, alas.
4.
I mentioned previously that modern Ukrainians are the descendents in some sense of the Cossacks, as their national anthem alludes. If you look at the Cossacks page on English Wikipedia, you will see in the upper right corner, where usually Wikipedia has the emblem of the people under discussion, instead, it has a thumbnail of a painting.
The painting that Wikipedians have decided to use to represent the Cossacks is the famous Ilya Repin painting, "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Sultan of Turkey" (Запорожцы пишут письмо турецкому султану). It shows a bunch of rough and barbarous men all looking very uproariously merry and pleased with themselves, gathered around a scribe writing something with a quill pen. It is an imagined image of an alleged historical event, in 1676. I'm not sure why the wikipedia page on the painting says that the event was legendary, as, apparently, we think we actually have the full texts of the two letters in question, first the letter of the Sultan Mehmed IV to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, telling them "I command you, the Zaporogian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, and to desist from troubling me with your attacks", and – this being why even if this event isn't mere legendary, it is legend – the Zaporozhian Cossaks' reply to the Sultan, which opens:
O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil's kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons. We have no fear of your army; by land and by sea we will battle with thee. Fuck thy mother.It proceeds from there another two paragraphs in like vein. You can read it at that link, or, if you prefer historically informed performance,
megpie71 shares with us a dramatic reading, in English translation by Peter Capaldi [YouTube]. Alas, approaching it in translation, we apparently lose some of its magisterial artistry: I gather the original is in rhyming couplets.With all the foregoing explained, you are now prepared to behold the following meme from 2014:
5.
Now, you may be wondering how to say "Putin khuylo" yourself, or you may be squinting at one of the videos above thinking, "Are they saying 'Putin, hello'?"
Wikipedia:
The Ukrainian band Teleri received international attention following the 6 May 2014 release of a song and a video titled "Putin Hello!" Their song uses a double entendre, substituting the objectionable word "khuylo" with the English word "Hello!" Alluding to the "Putin Khuylo!" chant, the video features band players wearing Ukrainian football club colors and posing as ultras marching and chanting "Putin Hello" as the refrain of the song. The band members asserted, tongue-in-cheek, that the linking of their song to an offensive anti-Putin chant was a misunderstanding and insisted that the only people who found the chant objectionable were Russians unfamiliar with English.So if you're an Anglophone not up to the subtleties of "khuylo", or intoxicated, you can punt with that pun. But authenticity is important in historically informed performance, so I encourage you to invest the further effort.
The initial "kh" is pronounced like the ch in "Bach" and "loch". The "uy" Wikipedia is saying is pronounced as "[ʊj]", which I attempted to search for guidance on, and found myself down an epic linguistic rabbit hole of how to pronounce "Uyghur" which was largely unhelpful because all the examples were in Flash which no longer runs. Recoursing to the primary source documents, these Kyiv Dynamos ultrafans (presumed inebriated) seem to my American ears to be saying "who low", with what we call a long "oo" sound ([ʉu̯]), while the ones in the top video above seem to me to be saying "hullo" with a short "u" as in "put".
PronounceKiwi, which has playable samples, gives it, in the Ukrainian, as like "oy" (as in "boy") only with a "u" (as in "put") sound in the front, so kind of phonetically "uy". In the several Russian offerings, it sounds variously like "oo-ee" or "oo-eh" (short e, as in "bet") so it comes out "Putin Kylo" (as in Kylo Ren) or "Putin khwellah".
(Years ago someone told me that Muscovites pronounce the first "o" in any word they come to as "a" - is that what explains the "ah" sound at the end of "khuylo" in two of the Russian examples?)
Perhaps one of our Ukrainian or Russian speaking readers will further enlighten us.
6.
If Russia's leadership had had any sense of proportion whatsoever, a potty-mouthed insult for their president would not have been an international incident, but they didn't so it was.
I don't know how fast you can get a law passed in Russia, but that initial footy club video was from the end of March, and on May 5th, Russia criminalized swearing in the media.
2014 May 5: BBC: "Russian law bans swearing in arts and media":
Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law banning all swearing in films, television broadcasts, theatres and the media.The article goes on to suggest this has something to do with the Community Party's supposed conservative values, saying
Offenders will face fines - as much as 50,000 roubles (£829; $1,400) for organisations, or up to 2,500 roubles (£41; $70) for individuals.
Where disputes arise a panel of experts will decide exactly what counts as a swear word.
Books containing swear words will have to carry warnings on the cover.
Russia's Vesti news website says that, according to sociologists' research, swearing is common in two-thirds of Russian companies.
The law will take effect from 1 July and will not apply to cases of swearing at performances before that date.
The law harks back to the conservatism of the Soviet period, when the Communist Party required artists and writers to avoid "decadent" Western fashions and to stick to traditional values.Maybe. But this is me looking at the timeline of "Putin Khuylo" going viral and being suspicious that the motivation for this law was not just some vague conservative impulse.
The Teleri song "Putin Hello"? Came out the next day after this law was passed.
See the thing about Russia and Ukraine is that insofar as the the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was Russia, Ukraine was under Russian rule for decades and Russian language fluency is ubiquitous in Ukraine, and there has been a lot of cultural exchange between these two nations. Ukrainian media products were often made in Russian so that they could be marketed to Russian consumers as well as Ukrainian ones.
And, presumably, Ukrainian and Russian football teams played against one another. Russia definitely has football teams ("sides"?): they just got kicked out the World Cup by FIFA, which implies that the Russian people normally participate in the international sacrament of footy, so it seems supremely unlikely there aren't quite a number of Russians who have been acquainted with this shining star of Ukrainian cultural heritage through attending away games, if nothing else. I assume some games are broadcast to watch on TV or streamed on the internet. It seems impossible that Russians weren't getting exposed to the "Putin khuylo" meme, which might explain why Russia was suddenly in such a rush to ban swearing in the media.
7.
And if footy as a transnational cultural force wasn't enough to introduce the Russian public to the Ukrainian hit "Пу́тин хуйло́, ла ла ла ла ла ла ла", the response of Russian leadership (and others allied with them) and Russian media then pretty much guaranteed it.
Wikipedia: the Streisand Effect:
The Streisand effect is a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet.Radio Free Europe, take it away (June 2014):
[Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs] Deshchytsya dropped the kh-bomb on June 14 while trying to calm angry crowds who had gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Kyiv to protest the downing of a Ukrainian military plane by pro-Kremlin separatists, an attack that killed all 49 people on board.So by getting their knickers in a twist so publicly, it pretty much guaranteed that any Russian who follows the news would have at least heard about "Putin khuylo" as a phenomenon. And from that follows that more people would have found out about the song, just because they wanted to know what the "obscene chant" was and Googled it, or asked on social media and got linked to it.
A visibly frazzled Deshchytsya repeated the slogan while privately attempting to persuade a protester not to storm the embassy. Unfortunately for him, the exchange was caught on video, where it has fueled indignation among Russia's suddenly very prim elite:
[Video, alas, missing due to a copyright claim]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov -- who once reportedly volleyed a series of f-words during talks with his former British counterpart, David Miliband -- called Deshchytsya a "renegade" and suggested he was inebriated, saying, "If you don't know how to drink, then don't."
The LDPR, whose leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky recently threatened to rape a pregnant journalist, announced it was sending books on etiquette to Deshchytsya "to improve his intellect, culture, and diplomatic competence."
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who once hijacked the public announcement system at Grozny's Terek football stadium to loudly accuse a FIFA referee of being corrupt and "a sellout a**hole b*tch," suggested Deshchytsya should apologize to Putin on bended knee for his "boorish behavior." [...]
The Russian president, it should be noted, has his own history of strong language. In addition to his infamous statement that Chechen militants should be "wiped out in the outhouse," he has threatened to hang then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili "by the balls" and even added a tough-guy "mlya" -- to the end of an already graphic sentence comparing journalism to nose-picking.
"Mlya" is a slightly softened version of the now-banned "blyad," or whore, which is commonly used by a certain demographic to lend punchy emphasis at the end of a phrase. Russian writer and curse-word enthusiast Viktor Yerofeyev, himself the son of a Soviet diplomat, once noted approvingly that "the syllables blya-blya-blya...echo through the air above Russia like the bleeps of a sputnik."
None of these expressions, however shocking, drop anywhere near the payload of the kh-bomb, which Russian media outlets, prohibited by law from swearing, have aridly described as an "undiplomatic expression," "obscene chant," and "uncensored insult" targeting Putin. (Russian media, by contrast, have no difficulty pronouncing the name of the protest group Pussy Riot, which one U.S. television station was forced to describe as "a female punk rock band named after a female body part which we're not going to say.")
If Putin's (minion's) aim in passing an anti-swearing law was to suppress the spread of "Putin khuylo" – both the slogan and the song – then that law was rendered ineffectual before it even went into effect.
8.
"Putin khuylo!" continued to spread. In the section of the Wikipedia page deliciously titled "International Reception", it says:
In October 2014, Belarusians joined visiting Ukrainians in a performance of the chant by "nearly the entire stadium" at a UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying match in Barysaw, Belarus resulting in more than 100 Ukrainian and 30 Belarusian football fans being detained and questioned, reportedly on suspicion of using "obscene language".[43] Seven, all Ukrainian, were sentenced to five days in jail for obscene language, while one was given 10 day sentence for allegedly wearing a swastika.[44]It's important to notice here, Belarus is another of those countries that's an ex-USSR republic, which Russia dominates. It has its own right-wing dictator and is very closely allied with Russia. It's actually really quite something that at a home game, in Belarus "nearly the entire stadium" of footy fans started chanting along with the Ukrainian fans, "Путін - хуйло! ла-ла-ла-ла-ла-ла-лаааа".
Apparently, yes, "хуйло" is the same word in Belarusan, too.
9.
My first response to reading about Russian state and media's consternation about "Putin khuylo" was to assume, American that I am, that it was of a kind with what our Republican Party members do: put on a big sanctimonious act as to how aghast they are at any (alleged) peccadillo of their opponents without for a moment meaning it sincerely. It doesn't even rise to the level of hypocrisy: they're being deliberately and almost sarcastically mendacious, and don't for a moment mean anything they're saying. They're just doing it as a "gotcha".
But upon further reading, it gradually dawned on me: you know, I think the Russians might be serious.
I mean, not serious-serious, in a "'mlya' is okay but 'khuylo' is not" way, but actually seriously upset. I don't think they're upset at swearing.
Because you don't pass an obscenity law if you want to take a posture of being scandalized by the conduct of your opposition. No, you wag your fingers and cluck your tongue at your opposition, you don't make it so that the general public can't swear in media.
Looking at what I can see of what happened, I am suspicious that what really caused Russia's leadership to get enormously bent out of shape was, very specifically, "Putin khuylo". It sure seems to have gotten under their skin in a way I would not have imagined anything possibly could.
And by "Russia's leadership", I suspect I mean the khuylo, himself.
10.
If we grant that is true, then we might ask why Putin found it that provoking. I mean, he's a dictator. You don't go into the dictator business if you're afraid people won't like you and might say mean things about you, or even swear at you. It sure seems, at first blush, mighty thin-skinned of someone who arranges people's murders.
And I'm pretty sure the problem is not that Putin objects to the word "khuylo", per se. Reports, as per above, say he's foul-mouthed bastard himself.
And I don't even think he would object all that much to people calling him "khuylo" in any a number of scenarios. I can easily imagine him relishing it as an expression of helpless fury, emphasizing how utterly he had dominated an opponent or a people, and how futile their vulgar defiance.
But he apparently didn't. He didn't chuckle in malevolent satisfaction like the sociopathic mustache-twirling villain he is. It seems – if I may imagine this for you, extrapolating from what is visible – his blood ran cold and his nostrils flared and he got all "How Very Dare", and ordered his minions to put a stop to "Putin khuylo".
Isn't that interesting! Why should "Putin khuylo" be a bridge too far? I think I know.
12.
There is someone who went down in history as "Æthelred the Unready" and I'm pretty sure he wasn't okay with it. For the record, the name Æthelred means "well advised", while "unready" – "unræd" – meant in Old English "poorly advised" [W] which manages to be even funnier and more awful than one would glean from the modern sense of "unready". It's like a king named "Smart" getting the epithet "idiot", and going down in actual fucking history, for all eternity, as "King Smart the Idiot". It's not possible to regard that, and the fact that that was how resoundingly he was known, without smirking and sniggering a little. It is, as John Oliver once put it about something else, "objectively funny."
History is full of people – mostly, but not exclusively, men – who bethought themselves "great", yet found themselves saddled with an epithet not reflecting the grandeur they thought fitting. "Ivan the Boneless", "Vasily the Cross-eyed", "William the Bastard", "Władysław the Elbow-High", "Henry the Impotent", and my personal favorite, "Ivaylo the Cabbage" ("a Bulgarian farmer who led a peasants’ revolt in the late 13th century and proclaimed himself Emperor of Bulgaria in 1278. He was overthrown the following year and assassinated" [Source]) among many, many others.
I am pretty sure that Vladimir Putin thinks of himself as a great man. I'm pretty sure he thinks of himself as an emperor in all but name. And given all his shirtless photos, I think we can all safely assume he is exquisitely vain.
I now think the thing that has struck him to the quick is not merely that pissed off Ukrainians have used naughty words at him. I think it's because they managed to make "Putin"/"Dickhead" a call-and-response throughout their country and it's been spreading to other countries. I think it's because Ukrainians managed to make an meme of "Putin khuylo", and in doing so, what has coalesced from their usage is an epithet.
I think the Ukrainians have managed to, for want of a word, epithetize Putin.
After all, that is the other way that, grammatically, "Putin khuylo" works.
I said, above, there's a a grammatical ambiguity in this phrase, because there's no verb in there, and no article. Yes, by default, the way two nouns together in a phrase with nothing to intermediate them relate is with an implied "is". "Putin [is] [a] Khuylo".
But another way that that grammatical structure is used is in the epithets of monarchs. The woman we know as "Catherine the Great" is known in Russian as "Екатери́на Вели́кая", literally "Ekaterina [the] Great".
A better translation of "Putin Khuylo" thus might be the verbless phrase, "Putin the Dickhead".
Putin the Dickhead, exactly parallel to the old epithets of kings – the terms that boiled down their whole reigns to single-word verdicts of history upon them.
I propose that what has infuriated him, in short, is this:
(2014, source)
I think it is this – being epithetized as "Putin the Dickhead", such that he might go down in history, forever, as "Putin the Dickhead", or rather as "Putin the Like Unto a Penis", "Putin the Fucker", "Putin the Unprintable in This History Textbook", "Putin the Rudest Word in Three Languages" – has sent him into an utter rage.
Or put another way, this is what Putin fears:
That's a kinda random English-language (American? Bostonian?) Twitterer casually referring to Putin Khuylo in conversation on the open internet.
There's a witticism in the SCA: "Do not meddle in the affairs of bards for they are unsubtle and your name scans to Greensleeves". Well it would seem that is precisely what the Ukrainians actually did. Whether they had any intention to or whether it was an entirely emergent phenomenon, they actually carried out the implicit threat of that joke, to make immortal their mockery of an antagonist through song.
Which is, when you think of it, what the Zaporozhian Cossacks did to the Sultan Mehmed IV of Turkey.
Cattle die and kinsmen die, yall, but wordfame is forever.
13.
There are many logical reasons Putin might have ordered the invasion of Ukraine. For instance, it's very economically productive and is a choice piece of real estate – what budding conqueror wouldn't want it? There's less logical reasons, more emotional in nature, that have been much discussed, such as a desire to Make Russia Great Again and reconquer all the USSR's old holdings, or maybe even believing his messianic narrative about saving the Russophones of Ukraine from the Nazis.
But then there's this.
Maybe – I know this is out there, but just maybe – Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine because of "Putin Khuylo". Maybe he did it out of outraged vanity and the fury of humiliation. Maybe this is all a narcissistic rage that the entirety of the Ukrainian people (and no few of their brethren in Belarus, Poland, and even Russia itself) have the insouciant audacity to know him as "Putin the Dickhead" and commend him so to history itself.
He does not expect to be loved by a people whose country he invaded in 2014, but he does expect to be feared. He expects their frightened deference. How dare they not be afraid of him! He feels entitled to their terror. He feels that they should be too scared of his might to speak so contemptuously of him! He is (he fancies) a mighty conqueror, after all, and the potentate of a great nation! How dare they mock him – were they to stand in Russia and say such things, he'd have them rounded up and arrested!
I hypothesize that he is outraged that he has cause to fear: fear for his legacy, fear for his fame, fear for his glory. The Ukrainians had been screwing it all up for him. They have snatched the halo from his head and tossed it in a toilet. He has been trying to prevent his epithetizing as "Putin the Dickhead" but he has had no leverage whatsoever to shut up the ultra-in-the-streets of Kharkiv. Sure, he could ban using the word "khuylo" in the Russian media, but that does nothing in Ukraine, in Belarus, in Poland, in any other country.
Maybe what's really going on is he's sent in the tanks to Ukraine to shut them all up, to terrorize them into shutting up or just killing them all so then they can't say anything.
This, I know, is a lot to attribute to any song, much less a song of three words chanted by sportsball fans.
But as hypotheses go, it has the advantage of explaining why everything about this invasion is so incredibly stupid. It being one big narcissistic tantrum explains why the invasion has been carried on so incompetently and with such little support, and it's why none of the rhetorical excuses given for the invasion make even the least sense.
If this is Putin on a butt-hurt personal vendetta, then he may have had to evade what little controls there are on the power of the president of Russia – he may have had to act precipitously and in secret from those who would have objected to his plan's lack of, well, plan, and he may have had to do without adequate funding given the lack of political support his whim had.
This being Putin just lashing out at the people of Ukraine would explain why his forces aren't even trying to keep to his "liberation" script, heading right to Kyiv and bombing indiscriminately. It might even explain why the forces he sent to Ukraine don't even really seem to know what their military objectives are, because, really, if Putin the Khuylo's real strategy is "conquer them, kill them, whatever, just make them stop saying that!", that's not actually an actionable military strategy.
14.
Speaking of the Streisand Effect, there was an absolutely 0% chance that I would ever have learned about the expression "Putin Khuylo", much less have written this entire essay for an English-speaking audience blithely unaware of it, had Putin Khuylo not invaded Ukraine. The only reason I am explaining this all to you now, and bequeathing upon you the knowledge of "Putin Khuylo" to carry forth into even more countries, is – I propose – because Putin is such a dumb fucking khuylo he invaded Ukraine over being called Putin Khuylo.
I am, of course, hardly the only person discovering Putin Khuylo. The chant and the epithet are exploding outward to more and more countries. Here it is appearing in anti-war protests and sporting events in:
Riga, Latvia, 2022 Feb 25
Kaunas, Lithuania, 2022 Feb 24 (I had not understood the Lithuanians were serious about basketball.) Another view
Tbilisi?, Georgia, 2022 Feb 24
Tbilisi, Georgia 2022 Feb 25
Tbilisi, Georgia, 2022 Feb 27 another view
Wrocław, Poland, 2022 Feb 24
Krakow, Poland, 2022 Feb 24
Paphos, Cyprus, 2022 Feb 28
And, perhaps most touchingly, here's a little pro-Ukraine protest in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, 2022 Feb 24. "Also chants of “Putin Khuylo!” which translates to 'Putin is a dickhead.' I’m told this is a common chant." writes @NickdelaCanal.
I do not know what the status of the expression "Putin khuylo" is in Russia, itself, but hackers compromised gas station pumps to display "PUTIN XUJLO!" on their readouts - here's a photo, 2022 Feb 28.
On the birb site, the hashtags #PutinKhuylo and #putinhuilo were very active when last I checked earlier this month. (Content warning: one of the things that inclines one to tag something #PutinKhuilo are images and video of war crimes. For some reason, more violent content seems more common on #putinhuilo than #PutinKhuylo.)
15.
And now, you, too know about Putin Khuylo.
Pass it on.
Loose change:
Pravda Brewery, in Lviv, cut over from brewing beer to making molotov cocktails. They're still printing labeles for their bottles though. They have special labels for the occasion. (Zoom in.)
One of my sources has been 2014 May 10: MaindanTranslations.com / Voices of Ukrain: "The Etymology of the Word: “Huylo” (as in “Putin Huylo”)" by Svtlana Fokina. It has further info.
2022 Feb 27: VAHASTU. MVH /@Vahastu on Twitter": "Putin logging into Twitter after a pretty shitty day at work just to see half of europe can now Call him dickhead in ukrainian. #PutinKhuylo MVH"
The English Wikipedia page on "Putin khuylo!" is another source I used, and has further information. It also has sheet music.
If you stick various spellings of "Putin khuylo" into YouTube, you will turn up various popular songs that use it, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dAYKtP_xLM. Note: this may do interesting things to your YouTube recommendations if you do it signed in.
Link for sharing: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1757108.html
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Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 02:02 am (UTC)The comment catcher comment for catching comments.
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 03:12 am (UTC)Back in the real worlds, I am also left with a renewed mixture of amusement, horror, anger, and contempt for such a one as Putin.
And also, I am impressed that you should invoke the memory of Æthelred the Unready.
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 04:01 am (UTC)(And it would make sense, wouldn't it, for that to be the ultimate Why.)
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 04:33 am (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 04:46 am (UTC)Inorite?! I was thinking about that, too.
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 04:45 am (UTC)The la-la-la-la-la-la-la part reminds me of Crocodile Rock. But now having listened to Speedy Gonzales, Crocodile Rock's la-la-la sounds like it may have been based on that song, settled lawsuit notwithstanding.
Last month I looked up how "Kyiv" is pronounced in Ukrainian. I had about as much success as you with this phrase.
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 06:54 am (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 08:31 am (UTC)I just wanted to suggest Forvo to look up real-people-native pronounciation of words:
https://forvo.com/search/%D1%85%D1%83%D0%B9%D0%BB%D0%BE%CC%81/
Thasks for the content
Crul.
Flash emulation
Date: 2022-03-25 11:36 am (UTC)https://ruffle.rs/
if you don't already.
Re: Comment catcher: OH! Speaking of tanks for a moment?
Date: 2022-03-25 12:55 pm (UTC)Details care of Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/03/24/the-ukrainian-army-has-captured-enough-russian-tanks-to-make-good-all-its-own-losses-and-then-some/
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 02:38 pm (UTC)Хуйлó has stress on the second syllable, or at least on both syllables equally. You can hear it in the chant - there's four equally stressed beats, with each vowel coming across solid, as is the nature of chants. Keeping the "o" sound is what functionally gives the second syllable stress.
As for how to pronounce it as an Anglophone, I would set aside the "ch" (loch/Bach) in this case, and glue together the English word "Who" with the sound "y" ("yes") and slur that into "lo."
If anything, I'd say the "lo" is the difficult part because whether you're saying "Lo and behold" or "Low load," English loves to add a "w" and Russian absolutely does not do that. Cut it short! Resist the urge! As a general rule of thumb, it's the vowels that make or break the "Russianness" of a pronunciation, so while practicing "h" to sound more like "kh" does improve the sound, you get more bang for your buck making sure your "u" sounds like "oo" and your "o" doesn't carry any trailing dipthongs.
I don't speak Ukranian, but from what I can tell, these are the exact same sounds used in all the soundclips. What with hearing a lot more Ukranian lately and parsing it as best I can, as far as I can tell, the same rules apply to nailing the distinctive vowel sounds and stress patterns for any other words and phrases you might want to pick up.
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 04:40 pm (UTC)That's sort of a counterpart to "go to war over being called Putin Khuylo" - one is to create a positive legacy, the other to avoid a negative legacy. I'm nothing like an expert, but what I read makes some combination of the two seem pretty plausible as a primary motivation.
Minor usage point
Date: 2022-03-25 04:41 pm (UTC)Thus, the presentation of the Ukrainian team names by which they would be more immediately recognized by those who follow the sport are "Dynamo [of] Kyiv" and "Shaktar [of] Donetsk". The "[of]" in brackets is by way of clarifying the relationship between the club name and its city, and does not normally appear in text or speech.
Anyway, I appreciate all the research that went into this article, and am chuckling far more than the troubling circumstances dictate at what is being done to someone who so richly deserve his vile epithet.
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 05:33 pm (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 06:00 pm (UTC)"I'm not sure why the wikipedia page on the painting says that the event was legendary, as, apparently, we think we actually have the full texts of the two letters in question"
"I gather the original is in rhyming couplets."
I did a bit of digging on that and I came across this article [PDF] comparing the language of two different texts of the letter. He dismisses a third text of the letter, saying, "The version of S. Rudanskij [...] is in verse and quite different from versions E and K. Since it is not truly epistolary, it will be excluded from consideration." In an addendum he adds a fourth significantly different text of the letter.
I was hoping the author would get deeper into the reasons why its authenticity is questioned, but he just cites a few references with brief comments. The impression I get is that the language of the letter indicates that it was composed around the time that it's said to have been written, but scholars aren't quite sure whether it was written and sent as an actual letter, or if it was written as a piece of literature and circulated.
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 07:54 pm (UTC)Hm, so like "bird" with a Brooklyn accent? :) This often gets written as "boid", but that has never seemed quite right to me.
What would make this better, I think, would be doing it with something that actually gets used as a name in English! King Victor the Loser, say? :)
In English it seems easier to come up with female examples here, actually -- Queen Grace the Clumsy, Queen Joy the Sullen, Queen Patience the Hasty. Perhaps King August the Ignoble? One could also use names that are associated with a particular quality even if they don't directly stated, such as King Fox the Idiot. And, while it's not actually an example of this pattern, I have to suggest King Hunter the Nimrod!
Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-25 09:59 pm (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-26 08:59 am (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-26 12:17 pm (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: Achievements in Ukrainian Music: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-04-10 06:04 am (UTC)Brilliant
Date: 2022-03-26 06:33 am (UTC)---Carlo Graziani
Re: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-26 07:50 pm (UTC)I read that one big reason the Russian military was so unprepared and so many soldiers didn't seem to know what they were supposed to be doing, was that Putin deliberately kept the invasion secret from his military (despite the fact that western intelligence knew it was coming and Biden announced it in public) - only a very few top commanders were included in the planning, which meant most Russian soldiers and commanders and even some up to the general level literally didn't know they were going to be invading Ukraine until the order to do it came that very night.
But I think I like your hypothesis anyway! :)
One question. You write,
"(Alas, this is not the moment of political harmony it first appears. This article in the Guardian suggests that Donetsk footy ultras are generally pro-Ukraine, not separatists.)"
Why would them being pro-Ukraine make that chant not a moment of political harmony?
Re: Putin Khuylo
Date: 2022-03-27 09:23 pm (UTC)Why would them being pro-Ukraine make that chant not a moment of political harmony?
Donetsk is one of those predominantly Russian-speaking states in Ukraine that have had strong Pro-Russia separatist leanings (and which Russia recognized as independent countries at the start of the invasion and are claiming to be rescuing). Donetsk ultras do not, alas, represent popular sentiment of Russophonic Ukrainians from Donetsk, and this video does not show east and west Ukraine coming together in mutual hatred of Putin.