Where does the expression “Like plywood over Paris” come from? Facts and folk legends. Where does the expression “Fly like plywood over Paris” come from?

Perhaps everyone knows the humorous expression “flying like plywood over Paris,” but only a few know that it is not so humorous and is associated with a specific historical event. At its center was a certain Auguste Fanier - a man who actually never existed, a fictional character, so to speak.

But his prototype was a very real character, and none other than French President Armand Fallier, who paid a lot of attention to the nascent aviation industry and aeronautics in general.

The birth of the myth of the French aviator-loser

This whole story is very confusing and full of contradictions from beginning to end. But its essence boils down to the fact that Auguste Fanier, supposedly a famous French aeronaut, suffered an accident during a test flight on an aircraft he designed and died in the process.

This event dates back to 1908, and it is as if a failed aviator, making his fatal flight, crashed into the Eiffel Tower, and this happened in front of thousands of amazed residents of the French capital. But all this is fiction, there was no plane crash in Paris in 1908, and Auguste Fanier the aviator himself simply never existed.

When and by whom was the catchphrase first said?

Another story associated with this myth dates back to the same time, that is, to the beginning of the 20th century, but it no longer took place in Paris, but in Moscow. Became winged - both directly and figuratively- the phrase is attributed to the very real, unlike Fanier, ardent fighter against tsarism, Martov, who was a member of the Menshevik party cell and was engaged in journalism.

Around 1911, in the Iskra newspaper, Martov published a note with ardent criticism of the existing regime, which included the following words: “... the power of Tsar Nicholas is flying as confidently towards collapse and death as Mr. Fanier’s plywood airplane!” But even here a discrepancy arises. Of course, Martov could come up with the name Auguste Fanier, but he could not write about it - “Iskra” was closed after the revolutionary events of 1905!

The real roots of the birth of the myth

In 1909, many newspapers in France published a cartoon depicting the then President of the Republic, Armand Falliere, seated on an airplane that was diving down. This was due to Fallier’s passion for the nascent aviation and his constant attempts to introduce and develop it in France. For this, the president was constantly subjected to caustic criticism, and he himself was considered a madman.

The fact is that only 7 years have passed since the Wright brothers first took to the air on their glider, and at that time few people still believed in airplanes; they saw the future in airships. And Auguste Falier - a French aviator (fictional) - became the prototype of Armand Falier - the president.

So where did the “plywood” flying over Paris come from?

Based on the above, it becomes clear who this mythical Auguste Fanier really is, but this does not explain anything about plywood, although many consider it a play on words: Fanier is plywood. But in reality, everything is much simpler: this expression was taken from French newspapers of the early 20th century, which long and meticulously talked about the flight over Paris of a luxurious, handsome airship called the Fallier (“Flaneur”).

These articles migrated from French newspapers to Russian ones; before the 1917 revolution in Russia, they were keenly interested in everything that happened in France, in particular in its capital. And Russians are known for their tendency to distort words taken from other languages, so the “Flâneur” that flew over Paris turned into veneer that is more familiar to our language.

So, at first glance, a simple catchphrase has a whole history that originated a long time ago. This once again proves that man by nature loves to change everything to make it look more beautiful. But as a result of this, in our dialect there is everything famous expression“flew like plywood over Paris.”

12. Ksiva

This slang word is at least three thousand years old. It was ksivs that the Jerusalem guards asked Christ and his apostles, because in Aramaic this word means “papers”, “documents”. And it came into Russian jargon with the help of educated Jewish bandits and swindlers, who at the beginning of the 20th century made up a significant part of the criminal world of Odessa and Kyiv. Jewish origin(from Yiddish and Hebrew) generally has about 10 percent of the words in the criminal dictionary - for example, “boy”, “shmon”, “shmot”, “shukher”, “raspberry”, “blat”, “parasha”.

13. Hunger is not an aunt

And again we have an example of how, having cut off the tail, everyone happily forgets about it. Why “not auntie”, but at least not “not uncle”? But because in its entirety the phrase had a completely understandable meaning: “Hunger is not an aunt, it won’t slip you a pie.” That is, unlike a kind-hearted female relative who will feed you at least furtively, hunger does not know any leniency.

14. Stay with your nose

Why is it bad to stay with your nose? Is it better without a nose, or what? No, the creators of this phraseological unit were not at all fanatics of noselessness. It’s just that 300 years ago, when it arose, the word “nose” had another meaning, almost as important as the main one. It meant “bribe”, “offering”, that is, something without which it was impossible to take a step in Russia of that time (and not only in Russia of that time). If the person who took the bribe was unable to reach an agreement with the official, he, accordingly, remained with his nose and felt unimportant about this.

15. According to the Hamburg account

IN late XIX- At the beginning of the 20th century, the world was gripped by the fever of the French struggle. In all circuses, the second section was assigned to mustachioed strongmen in striped tights, who, to the delight of the audience, relished each other's faces in the sawdust, performing all these amazing techniques: suples, roulade, tour de bras, nelson, parterre. There were champions more popular than singers, actors and princes; The names of Poddubny, Buhl and Van Riel were known to every self-respecting child over three years old. But very few knew that this whole struggle was a complete fiction like modern wrestling. The fight scenarios were written out in advance, and entertainment was much more important than sport. Wrestling impresarios sold the tournament results of their players, and fortunes were made on pseudo-totals. And only once a year the best wrestlers came to Hamburg, where they rented an arena and secretly, almost under the cover of darkness, in fair fights found out which of them was really the best, and who was just a mustachioed doll painted with stripes.

16. Pedal horse
And this mythical creature, the illegitimate cousin of the centaur and the puller, arose from the desire of Soviet industry to give the best to children. The most brilliant minds of our defense industry were thrown into creating the ideal hybrid of a wheeled horse and a bicycle. The mutant received the official name “pedal horse” and was launched in the late 1950s mass production. Children and parents were in ecstasy. The kids couldn’t ride the horsebox, pushing off with their feet as usual: the protruding pedals got in the way. And it was also impossible to turn the tight and clumsy pedals - a rare muscular child could cover a distance of several meters, after which he usually fell safely, since the structure also did not suffer from excessive stability. A few years later, horse builders were forced to admit their fiasco, and the pedal horse disappeared from the shelves, but remained forever in the people's memory.

17. Slap

This word, as well as the expression “Hey you, hat!”, has nothing to do with hats, soft-bodied intelligentsia and other standard images that arise in our heads. This word came into slang straight from Yiddish and is a distorted form German verb"schlafen" - "sleep". And “hat” means “Sonya, gape”. While you are here, your suitcase is draped.

18. Nonsense

The seminarians who studied Latin grammar had serious scores to settle with it. Take, for example, the gerund - this venerable member of the grammatical community, which simply does not exist in the Russian language. A gerund is something between a noun and a verb, and the use of this form in Latin requires knowledge of so many rules and conditions that seminarians were often taken straight from class to the infirmary with a brain fever. Instead, seminarians began to call any boring, tedious and completely incomprehensible nonsense “nonsense.”

19. Unfrightened idiot

Most people suffering from congenital idiocy have the fortunate feature that they are quite difficult to frighten (as well as convince them to use a spoon and button up their pants). They are too persistent in their unwillingness to absorb any information from outside. The expression went for a walk with light hand Ilf and Petrov, who in their “ Notebooks” enriched the world with the aphorism “The land of unafraid idiots. It's time to scare." At the same time, the writers simply parodied the title of Prishvin’s then very popular book “In the Land of Unfrightened Birds”

20. The Moor has done his job, the Moor can leave
For some reason, most people (even those who have actually read Shakespeare) believe that these words belong to Othello strangling his Desdemona. In fact, Shakespeare's hero was anything but a cynic: he would rather hang himself than blurt out such a tactlessness over the corpse of his beloved. This phrase is said by another theatrical Moor - the hero of Schiller's play "The Fiesco Conspiracy in Genoa." That Moor helped the conspirators achieve power, and after the victory he realized that yesterday’s comrades did not care about him from the high Genoese bell tower.

21. Throw pearls before swine
The process of throwing small glass rubbish in front of a pig is truly an ideal idea in its senselessness. But in original text The Bible, from where this phrase was scratched, is not in any way spoken of. It talks about people who throw precious pearls into the pigs' feeder. It’s just that once upon a time the words “pearl”, “beads” and “pearls” meant precisely pearls, their different varieties. It was only later that the industry began to churn out cheap glass balls and called them a beautiful word"beads".

22. With a twist

The image of a zest - some small piquant detail that gives a feeling of sharpness and unusualness - was given to us personally by Leo Tolstoy. It was he who first coined the expression “a woman with a twist.” In his drama The Living Corpse, one character says to another: “My wife ideal woman was... But what can I tell you? There was no zest - you know, there is zest in kvass? “There was no game in our lives.”

23. Latest Chinese warning

If you were born before 1960, then you yourself perfectly remember the origin of this expression, because it is never forgotten. But subsequent generations were already deprived of the happiness of watching the confrontation between the United States and China at the turn of the 50s and 60s of the 20th century. When, in 1958, China, outraged by the US air and naval support of Taiwan, issued its angry note called "The Final Warning", the world shuddered in horror and held its breath in anticipation of a third world war. When, seven years later, China published the four hundredth note under the same name, the world howled with delight. Since, apart from pieces of paper with menacing words, China had nothing to oppose to the States, Taiwan still retained its independence, which Beijing still does not recognize.

24. How to give something to drink
It would not be very clear how the process of giving a drink is connected with the concepts of “certainly” and “guaranteed” if lists of criminal jargon of the 18th-19th centuries had not been preserved, in which the expression “give a drink” is considered a synonym for the word “poison”. For poisoning is truly one of the most reliable and safest ways for a murderer to get rid of a disturbing person.

25. Not one iota
Iota is a letter of the Greek alphabet representing the sound [i]. It was depicted in the form of a tiny dash, and quite often lazy copyists simply threw it out of the text, since even without one iota it was always possible to understand what it was about we're talking about. We don’t dot the “e”, right? The author of the phrase is Jesus Christ, who promised the Jews that the Law would not change “one iota,” that is, even the most insignificant changes would be excluded.

26. The case smells like kerosene
Yes, we, too, at first thought that these words were an ordinary phrase from the vocabulary of a fireman who, examining the charred ruins, puts forward a version of deliberate arson. So: nothing like that! The aphorism has a very specific author - the famous journalist Mikhail Koltsov, who published the feuilleton “Everything is OK” in Pravda in 1924. The feuilleton castigates the morals of American oil magnates, handing out “kerosene-smelling” bribes back and forth.

27. Alive, smoking room!

The famous expression, which everyone knows that it belongs to the poet Pushkin, actually does not belong to Pushkin. This is a saying from a once popular children's game. Children, standing in a circle, quickly passed a burning splinter to each other and chanted: “Alive, alive, the smoking room! The smoking room is still alive!” The same unfortunate person in whose hands the smoking room went out was considered a loser and had to perform some stupid and sometimes unsafe task - for example, pouring snuff into the nasty Amalia Yakovlevna's nightcap.

28. Piano in the bushes

But this phrase is actually the author’s. It was taken from the famous sketch by Gorin and Arkanov “Completely by accident.” In this sketch, comedians depicted the principles of creating reports on Soviet television. “Let’s approach the first random passerby. This is pensioner Seregin, a labor shock worker. IN free time he loves to play the piano. And just in the bushes there happens to be a piano, on which Stepan Vasilyevich will play us Oginsky’s Polonaise.”

29. Passion-face

The word became popular thanks to Gorky, who named one of his stories that way. But Gorky, who was not distinguished for his talent for verbal sophistication, did not come up with it himself, but stole it from an optimistic folk lullaby, which sounds entirely like this:

Passion-Faces will come,

They will bring with them Misfortune,

They will bring misfortune,

They'll tear your heart to pieces!

Oh, trouble! Oh, trouble!

Where shall we hide, where?

In general, if " Good night, kids! If they finally decide to change their song theme, we have something to offer them.

30. Dance from the stove
And here we have a slightly sad, but instructive example of how almost nothing remains of an entire writer. Does the name Vasily Sleptsov mean anything to you? Don't be upset, you're not the only one. Sleptsov today is known only to erudite specialists in Russian literature. He was simply unlucky: he was born and lived at the same time as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the other Turgenevs. So three words from Sleptsov remain in people’s memory. In the novel " Good man“The hero recalls how as a child he was tormented with dance lessons - they put him in front of the stove and forced him to dance across the hall. And he slips his nose, then turns his sock out - and again they make him dance away from the stove.

31. Filka’s letter
Unlike Trishka with his caftan or Kuzka with his mysterious mother, Filka is a completely historical person. This is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Philip II of Moscow. He was a short-sighted man who forgot that the first duty of the Moscow high priest is to diligently give to Caesar what is Caesar's, so he barked for his misfortune with the Tsar-Father Ivan the Terrible. I decided, you know, to expose the bloody atrocities of the tsarist regime - I began to write true stories about how many people the tsar tortured, tortured, burned and poisoned. The Tsar called the Metropolitan’s writing “Filka’s letter”, swore that Filka was lying, and imprisoned Filka in a distant monastery, where the Metropolitan was almost immediately finished off by assassins sent.

32. Quietly
Sapa is a word borrowed from French term, which in the Russian army meant a mine, a bomb, as well as any explosive work. Undermining under the walls of a besieged city or fortifications of an enemy camp was called sly. The sappers carried out this kind of undermining unnoticed, usually at night, so that the subsequent loud boom would come as a complete surprise to the enemy.

33. Bohemia
Creative intelligentsia, beautiful life, glamor and other buffets - all this has nothing to do with bohemia. The real bohemia that the Parisians had in mind when they used this word is the absence of housing and work, a lot of children, a drunken wife hugging guests, no regime, trash, chaos, lawlessness and dirty nails everywhere. Because the word “Bohemian” means “gypsy”, and in Russian “bohemian” is perfectly accurately translated as “gypsy”.

34. Cretin
Words sometimes jump from meaning to meaning, like lions on a trainer’s curbstones, and settle into the most unexpected combinations. For example, there was a doctor in France whose last name was Chrétien, which means “Christian.” Not that frequent, but not too much either rare surname(we called a whole class peasants, that is, Christians). But it was this doctor who managed to formulate the diagnosis of “congenital thyroid deficiency syndrome” for the first time. From now on, this disease was called “cretinism” after the scientist’s name, and the patients, accordingly, were called cretins. That is, Christians.

35. Suffer from bullshit
Perhaps we will get into trouble for writing such obscene language in our pious publication. Although, if you look at it, there is nothing indecent about the word “dick”. This is the name given to the letter “x” in the Church Slavonic alphabet, as well as any cross in the shape of the letter “x”. When unnecessary places in the text were crossed out with a cross, it was called “pokherit”. The old alphabet with all the basics and letters was finally abolished at the beginning of the 20th century, and the word “dick,” having fallen out of use, half a century later became a synonym for a short word starting with “x” (you know which one). And at the same time, a common expression with a similar root - “suffering with bullshit” - began to seem obscene. Hernia in Latin means “hernia,” and it was this diagnosis that kind military doctors most often gave to the children of wealthy townspeople who did not want to serve in the army. Every fifth city conscript in Russia at the end of the 19th century regularly suffered from garbage (the peasants most often could not afford garbage, and they were shaved much more actively).

36. Places not so remote
In the “Code of Punishments” of 1845, places of exile were divided into “remote” and “not so remote”. By “remote” we meant the Siberian provinces and subsequently Sakhalin, by “not so distant” we meant Karelia, Vologda, Arkhangelsk regions and some other places located just a few days’ journey from St. Petersburg.

Using

This well-known phraseological unit is used in speech when they want to emphasize a major failure, the loss of a good chance, a missed opportunity. It reads in full like this: “Fly like plywood over Paris.” Where the expression “Like plywood over Paris” came from in our language - we will discuss in this article.

It’s worth starting with the fact that no one has really yet proven exactly when and why these words came into everyday use. folk speech. All versions circulating on the Internet and on the pages of magazines are nothing more than a kind of folk etymology, devoid of serious linguistic confirmation.

It is also known that there have never been any airship crashes over Paris. Moreover, the names of all, without exception, airships that have ever crashed are known for certain, and among them there is no “Flener”. Such events occurring not in hoary antiquity, but in the foreseeable historical times, when journalists were already working hard in Europe, they could not have gone unnoticed.

The last of the above options could be true. However, he also looks dubious. The fact is that following his logic, phraseological units should be found in literature, colloquial speech already in those years. But no one noticed this! There is no evidence that such words were at all popular in those years. They appeared “on hearing”, probably much later, not earlier than the end of the 70s. And this fact leads us to the fourth, probably the most plausible version.

Linguists have noticed that this expression appeared in literature somewhere at the turn of the 70s and 80s. In all likelihood, around the same time (well, maybe 5 - 7 years earlier) the phraseological unit entered popular speech. In the 70s of the 20th century, televisions began to spread en masse in the USSR, and with them, the Soviet viewer became acquainted with a number of documentaries. Among them were many films dedicated to the development of aeronautics.

As you know, France at one time turned out to be one of the few countries where European culture began to develop. IN documentaries one could see the first clumsy, slow airplanes flying over Paris. As already noted here, they were all plywood... .

The image of an airplane, devoid of grace, moving with difficulty over Parisian houses, gave birth to a bright, juicy phrase in someone’s creative head, which soon became a common phraseological unit. So, when considering where the expression “Like plywood over Paris” comes from, it is most likely worth accepting this latest version.

2 Sometimes in everyday speech expressions and sayings slip through, the meaning of which is not always clear to us, and their origin is generally hidden in the fog. Today we will talk about one of these phraseological units, this is "".
However, before continuing, I would like to advise you a few more popular articles on the topic of proverbs. For example, what does Head is spinning mean, how to understand the proverb Proverb of the Nations, the meaning of beat, but listen, the meaning of For one beaten, two unbeaten are given, etc.
So, let's continue, where does the expression Flew like plywood over Paris come from? In general, the formation and origin of this proverb is not known, and there are several versions on this matter.

Flew like plywood over Paris- the origin of this phrase is attributed by many to the moment of the flight of the airship "Flenaire" over the capital of France, and its name, unusual to Russian ears, was turned into "plywood" by rumor.

Fly like plywood over Paris- many associate the appearance given expression with the demonstration flight of pilot Auguste Fanier over Paris in 1908, which ended tragically. He died after getting caught in the Eiffel Tower. After this, a small note by Comrade Martov appeared in the Bolshevik Iskra, who noted that the tsarist regime was flying to its death as quickly as the aviator Fanier over Paris

There is another version that claims that this phraseological unit appeared in 1987 due to an error as a result of the publication of the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
However, researchers discovered this saying published in 1984 in fiction, which completely refutes the third version. Moreover, these inquisitive citizens note that some still remember that this phraseological unit was used in an ironic context back in 1980 during the summer olympic games in Moscow, and therefore this fact was clearly remembered.

This issue was raised in the program " Echo of Moscow", when some radio listener wanted to know what "Flew like plywood over Paris" means? However, to find an answer to the origin of this catchphrase Even professional journalists couldn’t.

And now the most interesting thing, it turns out there is accurate data that the pilot’s name Auguste Fanier never existed. Moreover, the same catastrophe that is stated in the second version was not registered in 1908, in which Auguste crashed into Eiffel Tower. It is even more interesting that the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra was published from 1900 to 1905, so no one could write a note in 1908, since it had not been published for three years.

According to the author of this article, this expression appeared among intelligentsia at the end of the 70s of the last century. It was then that there was a cult of everything Western, but I do not exclude that I am mistaken.

One of the first evidence of the use of this expression refers to 1989 year in the play by Nikolai Kolyada Murlin Murlo, and it sounds like: “And we will fly like plywood over Paris.”

An unusual distortion of the saying: " Fly like plywood through Paris", in which the word "plywood" implies money.

The most plausible version of the origin of this saying dates back to 1909, when over Channel flew by an aviator known in narrow circles named " Fallier", while Nicholas 2 became interested in this aircraft and ordered it for Russia. And since at that time everything related to aviation was well known, and the fact that we purchased airplanes from paddling pools became common knowledge, the aviator’s last name was changed into the Russian style, like “plywood” (Fallier).

Interesting expression. And quite often used. You probably also often use it in the sense of “he failed”, “missed the opportunity”, well, or, as it is now fashionable to say, “epic fail”. But why plywood?! Especially Paris... Sometimes, looking at some Russian expression that is completely understandable to all Russians, you are simply amazed - how?! Well, how could it appear, and even become so popular and known and understood by everyone from a young age. This expression is one of those.

Let's figure out where his legs grow from.

I’ve heard a bunch of versions of the origin of the expression “flying like plywood over Paris.” Well, although, not exactly a bunch, but I’ve heard five versions. The most popular one is that a certain Auguste Farnier flew at the beginning of the 20th century on one of the first planes over Paris, flew and killed himself on the Eiffel Tower. The press trumpeted this - and the expression “like Farnier over Paris” became a catchphrase, symbolizing failure. Often in this legend there is a certain Menshevik Martov, who wrote something in the Iskra newspaper about tsarism, which is flying towards collapse like Farnier over Paris.

This is complete nonsense. Complete. There has never been a person with that name, no one has ever been killed on a plane on a tower, and, naturally, no press has ever written about it. And in the legend with Martov, even the date of his article is indicated - approximately 1911. Yes, yes. Especially if you consider that the Iskra newspaper closed in 1905, then the article was published in 1911, but of course.

The second version - they say, some kind of airship, new, beautiful and elegant, either the “Flaneur” or the “Faleur”, flew for a long and tedious time over Paris, giving rich slackers rides. The press wrote a lot about this, and since in Russia they liked to read something French in their spare time that was good for the head and body, this information became popular, and then viral.

Also nonsense. Crazy. There has never been such an airship, and it is quite stupid to assume that such an article from French newspapers could become a popular expression of the Russian people.

Another version is about the aviator Fonnier, another is simply about the plywood airplanes of that time, etc. etc. None of them stand up to criticism or any thoughtful examination.

Well, after all, where did this expression come from? No version will give one hundred percent accuracy. But I think the most likely is the following - the origin catchphrase“flew like plywood over Paris”, associated with the President of the French Republic at that time, Armand Fallier.

Armand Fallier is a very progressive person who strongly supports the idea of ​​flying heavier-than-air vehicles, despite the fact that at the beginning of the 20th century they were considered an uninteresting toy. Airships were considered the main hope of flyers of all countries and continents, and it was them that the press, choking, praised, it was they who allocated money and it was on them that hopes were pinned.

Airplanes were an ugly child, and in good form it was considered to laugh at them. So all sorts of caricatures of airplane pilots and their clumsy machines came out in heaps. By the way, they consisted precisely of plywood. Well, the French press could not ignore its president, an airplane enthusiast. Therefore, a whole series of cartoons appeared, which depicted Fallier on an airplane, in the strangest poses and moments, for example, hitting the Eiffel Tower.

The Russian Menshevik Martov saw this caricature and wrote about it, comparing the fall of tsarism and the crash of an airplane. But not in the Iskra newspaper, but in some later publication. Well, the Russian people took the expression they liked, changed it a little - and entered it into the annals, so to speak, of history.

So it turns out that some versions have some truth, some do not, but the truth, as it always happens, is somewhere nearby.

Although, if you think about it, it’s strange, isn’t it? After all, in fact, the expression came from a stupid caricature, a stupid anecdote, picked up and altered in its own way.

And, by the way, it turned out quite well, if it were all flying like plywood.

Where did the expression “Fly like plywood over Paris” come from? updated: February 6, 2017 by: Roman Gvozdikov