Секс = Презерватив

My teacher at one point commented that my grasp of Russian grammar is fairly good, but that there are several bits of basic vocabulary that I know nothing about. As a result, she set out to teach me about food, since I'm useless when you hand me a restaurant menu.

In addition to making me hungry, all this talk of food unleashed a surprising degree of Soviet sentimentality from my thirty-something-year-old teacher. "When I was young," she'd tell me in Russklish, "Butter was BUTTER. It went bad very quickly, and it had this smell to it when it did. Now, you buy butter, and you can leave it out, and it won't spoil. It won't ever smell. It's very strange, I don't think it's real butter." (I think these "processed food" woes she and I both share are a productive of the modern times in general rather than a particular dedication of the Soviet Union to all things natural, but I digress.) So, I ask in Russian, "Are there many preservatives in food nowadays?" I was about to pat myself on the back for asking a relevant and intelligent question in grammatically correct Russian, but my teacher cracked up before I could do so. Apparently in Russian, as in French, the word pronounced "preservateev" is not a preservative, but a condom. "Do you put condoms in your food?" (And that's about the one innocent-question-turned-odd-sex-talk that I managed to avoid for the duration of my time in France.)

So I recount this story to Brian over lunch today, and suddenly a lightbulb goes off in his head. There's an advertisement all over the metros with a smiling woman asking, "Wanna go get coffee?" Underneath is the title of this blog post: "seks=preservateev." (Who says there are few English-Russian cognates?) An HIV/AIDS awareness organization sponsors the ad. Brian told me, "I wanted to ask what a preservateev was... I was thinking it had to do with the demographic problem you have in Eastern Europe [fairly rapid population loss], and maybe they were encouraging people to go out and procreate? But if they're doing that, why would they be talking about HIV? It seems like a mood-killer."