I’m rereading Sorokin’s Норма (The Norm; see this post) more slowly and carefully than the first time, when I skipped over a lot of difficulties in my eagerness to see where it was going, and I’ve been brought up short by a sentence that I simply don’t understand — not because my Russian is insufficient but because I don’t know enough about firearms. In Part 3, the story about Anton revisiting his childhood home, he’s remembering the long-ago days when he went hunting with his father, and we get this sentence:
Воcемнадцатилетний Антон cидел в углу, зажав меж колен cтаpинное шомпольное pужье и тщетно cтаpаяcь оттянуть от полки запавший куpок.
The eighteen-year-old Anton was sitting in the corner, holding an old-fashioned muzzleloader between his knees and trying in vain to pull the ?? from the ?.
The ?? represents “запавший куpок”: запавший literally means ‘fallen’ but I think can also mean ‘stuck’ (клавиши западают means ‘the piano keys are sticking’); куpок is ‘cock, cocking piece (hammer of a firearm trigger mechanism),’ but colloquially (and “incorrectly,” as Russian Wiktionary puts it) it can be used to mean ‘trigger.’ The final question mark is for “полки”; полка means ‘shelf’ but in the context of a firearm means ‘(flash) pan.’ The problem is that not having had anything to do with firearms I can’t visualize what’s going on here and have no way to judge what a correct translation would be. (I don’t even know if this is a rifle or a shotgun, though I presume in the preceding scene they were using shotguns to hunt grouse — see the 2020 discussion beginning here.) Any and all enlightenment is welcome!
If you look at the little computer-animation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flintlock#Method_of_operation you will see that the cock ends up in the pan when the gun is fired. It’s supposed to come back out easily as part of the reloading process, but maybe in a poorly-maintained gun it gets stuck?
ETA: I have myself fired a black-powder muzzle-loader, back when I was maybe 16 and on a Boy Scouts “high adventure” trip. Don’t think it was an actual flintlock as opposed to embodying the more advanced 19th-century percussion-cap technology, but my memory is not certain on that.
Thanks, that gives me a much clearer idea!
From that diagram I have learned the word “frizzen”, whence it’s just a click to “snaphance”, which I am disappointed to find is not pronounced with an /f/
Wikipedia; oddly, frizzen isn’t in the OED.
However, it is in M-W, which says “alteration of earlier frizzle, of unknown origin,” and OED does have that (entry “First published 1898; not yet revised”):
I wonder when and why it became “frizzen.”
I asked ChatGPT to give me
a) a literal translation and
b) a literary translation:
a) trying to pull the sunken trigger away from the sear.
b) trying in vain to free the jammed trigger.
and explain it:
A sear is a small part in a gun’s firing mechanism. It holds the hammer, striker, or firing pin back under spring tension until the trigger is pulled. Pulling the trigger moves the sear, which then releases the firing part and causes the gun to fire.
So, when the original Russian says:
“оттянуть от полки запавший курок”
(literally: to pull the sunken/pressed-in trigger away from the sear)
…it means that the trigger is stuck or jammed in a way that it’s too close to or caught on the sear — and the character is trying to pull it back or free it.
If you have U.S.-raised kids of the same approximate age as my oldest or the cohort before that it is reasonably probable that when they were younger you were familiar with Ms. Frizzle, the perky-to-feisty animated-teacher character in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus
Thanks, sh! “Sear” is in the OED (“A portion of a gun-lock which engages with the notches of the tumbler in order to keep the hammer at full or half cock, and which is released (at full cock) by pressure upon the trigger”), and it too is “Of unknown origin.”
I have owned and fired an ‘old-fashioned muzzle-loader’ (a replica Brown Bess flintlock musket) for historical re-enactment purposes, and I can tell you that it doesn’t have a ‘sear’, but it does have a ‘cock’.
Thanks!