Three Kids? You Showoffs.

By Pamela Paul
Sunday, April 6, 2008; B02

My husband and I are getting ready to do what many couples in these brink-of-recessionary times would consider unthinkable. No, we're not buying a Martha's Vineyard retreat or planning a month in St. Bart's or eco-decorating our house.

We're planning to have a third child.

What shocks people, when we tell them, isn't the thought of hauling three kids onto a place for a vacation, or even the idea of coming home every night to a houseful of runny noses and homework assignments. What gets them is the sheer financial audacity. Raising kids today costs a fortune. Last month, the Department of Agriculture estimated that each American child costs an average of $204,060 to house, clothe, educate and entertain until the age of 18.

But to me, a family with just two kids seems minimalist, and even a bit sad. Back in the 1970s, when my husband and I were born, sprawling families were more common. My husband had two sisters and, following a Brady-Bunchy set of remarriages in my family, I wound up with seven brothers, real and step. I've always fantasized about creating a "Meet Me in St. Louis"-style household of my own, with children constantly underfoot and enough relatives around to skip to my lou en masse.

And yet nowadays, people seem aghast if a couple wants more than two children. When Elana Sigall, a 43-year-old attorney in Brooklyn, was pregnant with her third, people came up to her constantly, she said, to admonish her: "You've got a boy and a girl already. Why don't you just leave it alone?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/04/AR2008040403217_pf.html

The Economist on the Joys of Russian

via shaulreznik

THE language I am fondest of is Russian. It is a bruised sort of affection, like the residue of many years with an intense but difficult lover. No other language has caused me such pain, or given me such pleasure in the discovery of its quirks and beauty. [...]

Finally, Russian is also rich in slang—so rich that it has not one slang, but two. The first, fenya, is a criminal patois similar in style to Cockney rhyming slang, Argentinian lunfardo and the mid-20th-century British gay argot, polari. It uses substitutions, as well as loan-words from other languages, to confuse the unwary: silver is “laundry”, having sex is “frying”, stealing is “buying”, and so on.

Interestingly, fenya contains a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew words: Jews entered the criminal world during tsarist times, when they were barred from owning land and from many professions. A common phrase even today in Russian is na khalyavu, “for free”, from the Hebrew khalav, “milk”, because “milk money” was the name of donations for the Jewish community in Palestine.

The second kind of slang, mat, is like a much more sophisticated version of the Chilean huevón words (see Tuesday)—an entire language derived chiefly from a handful of sexual swear-words. One of my prize possessions is a 560-page dictionary of mat that I found at Grant and Cutler, a specialist languages bookshop in London.

The dictionary, published in Moscow in 1997 by one Professor Tatiana Akhmetova, seems to be an academic lexicon rather than a survey of current usage. Most of my Russian-speaking friends have never heard of much of it. But one particular phrase is so original and colourful that I have been running a small private campaign to bring it back into everyday use. To describe something that has shown up unexpectedly, out of nowhere, you say that it appeared kak iz pizdy na lyzhakh, which translates as “like out of a cunt on skis.”
http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10943973