If you watch the series 'The Americans' you know it is a story about Russian agents posing as an American suburban couple, all the while spying for 'The Center.' They even kill some people in the process. They make an otherwise nice couple, raising a teen-age boy and girl and running a travel agency in suburban Washington D.C.. They recently even got married in the most recent episode.
Also in this episode, Philip is in the kitchen of a Russian agronomist who has been sent to America to learn things. The Russian invites Philip to have some kvass he's made. He takes two jars of what looks like an overflow urine sample out of the refrigerator. Philip, wanting to be polite cautiously accepts the jar. No doubt he thinks it might be urine, or at least some lab experiment gone bad. The host explains it is kvass. He's made it himself, and it reminds him of Russia, He misses home.
Philip sniffs the jar just to make sure it could be potable, and pronounces it good. Turns out kvass is a Russian beer, made from rye. It has a rather low alcohol content. I guess we'd call it near beer, or Bud Light.
So, now I know the Spanish word for beer, cervesa, as well as a Russian word for homemade beer. Television is educational.
The second word I learned last night is a doozy. It is one you can spring on friends in a conversation and leave them wondering what the hell you're talking about: poontang.
If you're familiar with the FX Series 'Fargo' then you know about the loopy stories and North Dakota accents that are clipped and flat, emanating an infectious cadence that if you leave yourself exposed to them for more than an hour, you too will start talking like that.
To show you how loopy 'Fargo' is consider the latest episode follows the narration and music of Sergei Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf.' It takes a certain type of creative mind to blend that into a crime story.
Without going too much into the plot, there is a character Nikki Swango, an alluring ex-parolee who becomes her parole officer's girlfriend. Nikki is as crafty as she is cute. In October she manages to push an air conditioner out of its apartment house sleeve and incredibly time its fall to wipe out an idiot coming out of the entrance below, who her boyfriend put up to trying to steal back a rare stamp from his brother, with whom he has a deep-seated rivalry. So far, she has accomplished this while convincing the police it was all an accident and the building was warned about a loosly secured air conditioner.
I forget who, but either the brother of her boyfriend, Emmit Stussy, the millionaire parking lot king of Minneapolis, or a shadowy character with a mouthful of shipwrecked teeth, V. M. Vargas, who is trying to infiltrate the Stussy business empire and turn it into a conduit for illegal funds, refers to Nikki as a poontang.
You know form the context it is not a nice thing to say about the young lady, even if it might bear some applicability to Nikki. I still like to look words up in a hard copy dictionary, and took the chance that poontang was not some made up North Dakota slang, but actually was a word. The trusty OED told me: the word has its origin in French, meaning prostitute. The definition follows; sexual intercourse; sex; a woman or women regarded as a means of sexual gratification.
Nikki is a nice girl who you really could bring home to meet mom. She's a competitive bridge player, and waaaaay smarter than her boyfriend Ray. The female former chief of police, now just an officer due to a county merger, Gloria, is smart too. Somebody is going to catch up to someone.
And I'm keeping my dictionary handy.
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