About the origin of the expression “to fly like plywood over Paris.” Where does the expression “Like plywood over Paris” come from? Facts and folk legends

Flying like plywood over Paris. Beautiful phrase. Where did she come from? I had to turn to the universal mind for an explanation. An explanation was found immediately, then another, then another... There were already three versions. I had to check all three of these options and it turned out that two of them were simply lies, and one sounded extremely unconvincing.

There is nothing to do, you need to put forward your version. But first, about the three options that can be found on the Internet.

1. The most popular and most deceitful is presented in this text, which wanders from site to site.
“Back in 1908, the famous French aviator Auguste Fanier, while making a demonstration flight over Paris, crashed into the Eiffel Tower and died. After this incident, the famous Menshevik Martov wrote in Iskra that “the tsarist regime is flying towards its destruction as quickly as M. Fanier over Paris.” Later, the phonetics of the expression were unwittingly distorted by the masses, which led to the modern “fly like plywood over Paris.”

Yuliy Martov

This is complete nonsense, and the fruit of someone’s overly wild imagination, because:
a) No aircraft accidents near Eiffel Tower history doesn't know.
b) Neither ours nor the French sites, dedicated to history aviation, have no idea about any Auguste Fanier. In other words, he simply did not exist.
c) The newspaper “Iskra”, where Martov supposedly published these lines of his, was published from 1900 to 1905, and then from September to December 1917. It is easy to see that in the first case there was no applicant with an accident, and in the second there was no longer a tsarist regime.

2. The second option speaks of a similar accident, but he does not name the pilot, but speaks of the name of the device - the airship "Flener". Also complete nonsense, due to the fact that:
a) As already mentioned, history does not know any accidents of aircraft near the Eiffel Tower.
b) The airship "Fleneur" never crashed.
c) The airship "Flaineur" never existed.
e) Turning “Fleneur” into “plywood” is somehow problematic.

The Hindenburg airship crashes

For reference: airships with the names “Hindenburg”, “Shenandoah”, “Akron”, “Macon”, “R.38”, “R.101”, “Dixmünde” suffered disasters.

3. The third option has at least some basis and lies in the fact that there was such a president in France as Armand Fallier (in office from 1906 to 1913), who paid a lot of attention to the development of aviation. In 1909, he opened the first international aviation exhibition and a caricature of him was published in newspapers, where he is depicted in front of the Eiffel Tower in a falling airplane. The cartoon was reprinted, Russian liberals compared the tsarist system with the Faliere flying over Paris, the phrase was widely heard and the Faliere among the people easily turned into plywood.

Armand Fallier, 8th President of the Third Republic

This version has at least some real basis, but it raises strong doubts due to the following circumstances:
a) Is it really possible that some caricature of the French president really shocked people’s minds? Russian society, what was the reason for the emergence of a nationwide meme? And how many people were there in that Russia who had even heard of this Fallier?
b) After this cartoon, Russia saw a mass real examples more unfortunate circumstances, which, in theory, should have supplanted such an insignificant mythical incident. For example, the collapse of the tsarist regime (those who have flown by have flown by), the 1st World War with her unsuccessful military actions, Civil War(an inexhaustible storehouse of all sorts of spans), Patriotic War, which led Hitler to suicide (for the guy, obviously, not everything worked out as he had planned) and the like.
d) Nothing confirms that Russian newspapers reprinted the cartoon.
e) Even if we believe that the revolutionaries compared Fallier’s flight with the tsarist regime (about which there is also no information), then they could only do this in banned newspapers, and their circulation and popularity, for obvious reasons, were not great. How then did this image become so widespread?

The same caricature.

And finally, objections that apply to all three versions.
a) The phrase itself “Fly like plywood over Paris” appears, apparently, in the 70s of the last century. Why should its roots be sought in such a long-past time?
b) All three versions contain the collapse of the “plywood” flight directly in Paris, and in essence we do not need to get to Paris (albeit in such an unsuccessful way), but to bypass it, albeit without much desire.

So where did this phrase come from then? I don’t know for sure, I can only put forward a version.

In the 70s, they began to appear on television screens documentaries dedicated to the history of aeronautics. France was one of the pioneer countries of aviation. And everyone could watch the picture of a plywood airplane flying clumsily and at the same time persistently over the city of Paris.

Flying like plywood over Paris

It was then, in someone’s head, that this beautiful image- plywood flying over Paris.

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 failure”. But why plywood?! Especially Paris... Sometimes, looking at some Russian and absolutely everything Russian clear expression You’re just 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. and so on. 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 of the popular expression “flying like plywood over Paris” is connected with the President French Republic of that time by 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

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 a 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 have come up with the name Auguste Fanier, but he couldn’t write about it - Iskra was closed after revolutionary events 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.

It's so simple at first glance popular expression has a whole history that began 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. Xiva

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 which 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 horse on wheels with a bicycle. The mutant received the official name “pedal horse” and was put into mass production in the late 1950s. 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 of the 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. Throwing 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 50-60s 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 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 drink” is considered synonymous with 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 scribes 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 remembers how as a child he was tormented with dance lessons - they put him in front of the stove and forced him to walk dance step across the hall. And he either slips his nose, or turns out his sock - 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 term borrowed from French that meant Russian army mine, 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 be a complete surprise for 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 for the first time the diagnosis of “congenital insufficiency syndrome thyroid gland" 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