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Bydlo is Ukrainian word and it literally means "cattle". It can be used also to describe somebody, who will eat his food and do his job slowly and silently, wit
by v_lisivka 8y ago
Bydlo is Ukrainian word and it literally means "cattle". It can be used also to describe somebody, who will eat his food and do his job slowly and silently, withstanding any tortures, and doing nothing to help himself or to help others.
Russians picked up this word recently and use it as synonym for "redneck", often used as label for Ukrainians.
In this case, it means more like "redneck".
- Tade0 8y agoWe use the same term in polish, but the meaning is different. It usually means a large congregation of people - often during some event - that make said event worse by their presence in such numbers.
- tetromino_ 8y agoI am sorry, but you are factually wrong. The word bydlo was borrowed into Russian (from Ukrainian, which in turn got it from Polish) a very long time ago, and has been used in works of Russian literature (Aksyonov, Strugatsky brothers, Sholokhov, Kuprin) through the entire span of the 20th century, including before the revolution. According to the Russian National Corpus, the earliest usage in Russian print was in 1869. The word and its usage has nothing to do with Ukraine, and is not used as a epithet for Ukrainians or any other particular ethnicity - unless talking about specific Ukrainians (or Russians, or Americans, or whoever else) who act like bydlo. EDIT: I was wrong about the etymology. Updated.
- v_lisivka 8y ago«Bydlo» has root «byt`», which mean «to live», so «bydlo» in Ukrainian literally means «an animal, which lives with someone», i.e. cattle. Only Ukrainian language still have calling form of words in use, so, if this word is borrowed, it's borrowed more than 1k years ago, i.e. at times of Volyniana, kingdom of all Slavs, before kingdom was split into parts. For us, with more than thousand years of history, few decades ago is recent history.