BARF DETERGENT.

March 15, 2003 by 5 Comments

And other multilingual experiences of a traveler to Tashkent: Buyer Bedazzled, by Ronald Cluett. Via Kip, who links to it in the course of a long reminiscence of being an American kid in ’70s Iran (in a town confusingly called Arak) that is well worth reading for its own sake.

Comments

  1. --k. says
    March 16, 2003 at 7:18 pm

    I did not know “Arak” was also spelled “Iraq.” (I mean, if I had, I’d’ve made hay of it, to be sure.) Wow. Learn something new every day…

  2. language hat says
    March 16, 2003 at 11:11 pm

    So, Kip, did you learn any Farsi while you were there? (And if so, do you remember it?)

  3. qB says
    March 17, 2003 at 8:37 am

    I’ve spent nearly an hour admiring the view from this lovely link ladder. Thank you.

  4. languagehat says
    July 16, 2025 at 4:02 pm

    In the course of fixing the dead links in the post I was gobsmacked — and, of course, pleased — to discover that Kip’s blog is not only still there but is still being regularly updated. (I provided an archived link to his reminiscence for a nostalgic view of what the blog looked like a couple of decades back.) I was also gobsmacked to realize I had ignored this bit from the Cluett post:

    Looking for an English-Farsi lexicon, I ended up with something far more poignant – a dictionary which translated into Russian from Pashto, one of the languages related to Farsi which is spoken in Afghanistan. It had been published in Moscow in 1986, during the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Thousands of Russian troops had passed through Uzbekistan en route to the Afghan front; undoubtedly, this small dictionary had been part of a Russian soldier’s kit. I bought this unique piece of Cold War memorabilia for fifty cents.

    How could I have failed to mention that I also own a Pashto-Russian dictionary!

  5. ktschwarz says
    July 16, 2025 at 6:19 pm

    Barf detergent sounds dimly familiar, I think I must have read about it on Language Log (2008).

    Ronald Cluett apparently believed in the hoary old “Chevy Nova” urban legend when he wrote that piece (no date on the page, earliest archive capture is from 2001). Oh well, maybe by now he knows better.

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