Prison abbreviations: meaning, features and interesting facts

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:41

Frantic, rapid and high-speed pace of life, the desire for savings in everything always and everywhere. In our life, such a phenomenon in the Russian language as abbreviations has firmly established itself. What it is? An abbreviation is a special set of characters that is formed by abbreviating a word or phrase by the first letters, syllables or parts of words and even sounds included in the name of an object or phenomenon. In a simple life, it is very often necessary to save space and time. Therefore, people begin to use simple abbreviations, which become frequently used. These can be compressed phrases or words.

History of abbreviations

The history of the appearance and formation of such a linguistic phenomenon as abbreviations dates back to ancient times with the advent of the written language. All peoples who could write used abbreviations. Saving space on the material (on papyrus, birch bark, ceramic tiles) and the speed of writing the text were important for scribes. Antiquity began to develop the use of abbreviations in inscriptions on buildings, and then in manuscripts.

Often the Romans abbreviated proper names, and then official words, for example, cos. - Consul. The Greeks began to use abbreviations similar to the Romansin his papyri and coin inscriptions. This phenomenon became widespread with the reduction of measured and weight units.

Thanks to the development of Roman jurisprudence, a code and system of rules for abbreviations was compiled. It was they who later began to be used in the medieval era. "Tyron badges" - one of the most famous systems, which is the basis of Roman rapid writing - tachygraphy. These marks, not without the Latin language, went further into the Middle Ages, where they were also used in manuscripts and coin inscriptions, letters.

Further on, Greek and Latin letters were used in cursive. And thanks to this, special signs appeared for reducing syllables, as well as not only double consonants, but also vowels. The Greeks were the first to use the method of reducing a word by its initial letters, from whom the Romans adopted it. The most common abbreviations are in the legal, medical and theological fields.

Prison abbreviations as a separate large significant group

Prison jargon (it is also called criminal, thieves or thieves, and it is even more correct to call it “argo”) is a special dialect that arose on social grounds in a criminal environment. The resulting language system, which included special terms and expressions to identify members of the criminal community, was opposed to the language system of a law-abiding society.

One of the main purposes of prison slang is to make it difficult for ordinary people to understand the meaning of what was said between the declassed elements.uninitiated. Prison abbreviations (thieves', in the form of tattoos) served as one of the main and effective tools for achieving this goal. Consider the types of abbreviations. They are different - alphabetic, syllabic, sound, semantic, etc. The typology of abbreviations is huge and specific.

In the largest division, they are divided into initiative and syllabic. Each of these groups contains its own subgroups. Let's look at each of them in prison jargon abbreviations.

Initial abbreviations

The first type of abbreviation in this group is a letter abbreviation, which is read as the letters are called in the alphabet.

Examples: AA - "hell's angel", PVA - "I despise your asset".

The second type of abbreviation is sound. She is acrophonic. The principle of its construction is such that the first letters of the constituent words are also taken, but they are not read by alphabetical name, but as a single word.

Examples: HORN - "the state doomed (to) slaves forever", BOTTOM - "give us a little rest", "give us a breath".

The letter-sound abbreviation combines the two listed above. That is, it includes both the alphabetic names of letters and their mergers into words. Such abbreviations are not used in prison slang.

Backronyms create a special group. These are abbreviations that are created according to an existing abbreviation. There are a lot of such examples among prison abbreviations. Example: GOD, CAT, CROSS, SWANS, SUMMER, SKY, DAD, LIGHT.

There is also a recursiveabbreviations. This is a type of abbreviation that includes in its decoding not only words, but also the abbreviation itself. For clarity, here is an example: PHP - PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. There are no recursive abbreviations in prison abbreviations.

Syllabic abbreviations

Another large group are syllabic abbreviations. Prison abbreviations do not actually occur in this type, but it is still necessary to consider this point for a general understanding. There are several ways to get syllabic abbreviations:

The initial parts of two or more words are formed: department store - department store.
The beginning of one word and another word from the whole phrase are connected: a terrorist attack is a terrorist act.
The initial part of the word is formed with the form of the indirect case of the noun: head of the department - head of the department.

Connect the beginning of the first word and the beginning and end of the second / end of the second word: moped - mo(tocycle)+(bike)ped.

Prison tattoos and acronyms

There is an opinion that the prisoners began to make tattoos of their own free will and for internal reasons. But this is not entirely correct. The Russian government itself gave impetus to the development of prison tattoos. Abbreviations, images - all this subsequently began to be applied to their bodies by prisoners. And before that, the state stigmatized those violators of law and order who were life-long Siberian convicts. Over time, tattoos have changed their meaning and essence. They became in some way a passport, a visiting card of every prisoner.

The tattoos spoke about belonging to a declassed society, about the place of their wearer in the hierarchy of the underworld. There are no prison tattoos that do not have a special meaning. Each of them describes a certain status and specialization of a person in the underworld. Tattoos include a variety of images and abbreviations. There are a huge number of prison cuts, and we will look at the most famous ones.

ELEPHANT

Such a tattoo is typical for Soviet and some Russian prisoners. ELEPHANT - abbreviation - prison tattoo, which consists of four letters.

The official and main transcript is "death by a cop from a knife." However, there are other options for deciphering this abbreviation. Firstly, "Soviet camps for special purposes", secondly, "Solovki camp for special purposes", and thirdly - "Glory to Lenin - our father." Sometimes there is also such an option as "from an early age there are only misfortunes." The ELEPHANT tattoo has no special restrictions for its application. But because of certain words, such as "cops" and "knife", it was mainly applied by convicts who are negatively disposed towards the authorities.

GOD

A lot of prison cuts are interpreted differently. The same applies to the acronym GOD. The prison tattoo, which has nothing to do with religion, has several interpretations. And often its true meaning is known only to its bearer and no one else. The most famousdecryption is, firstly, "God will forgive sins", and secondly, "was condemned by the state." There are also options such as "I'm afraid to be hungry", "I will rob again" and "Be careful, the robber."

BOSS

BOSS is an abbreviation for prison, which has nothing to do with the modern understanding of the word. A tattoo with these four letters is one of the most unambiguous, having a small number of decodings. So, the first version of the full name is “was convicted by the Soviet court”, and the second and very close in meaning is “was convicted by the Soviet Union.”

Meaning of prison abbreviations

Prison abbreviations and their meaning can be classified into several groups. For example, there are abbreviations that tell about the attitude of the convict to the country, government and politics:

AGMD - "Adolf Hitler is my friend";
ALLURE - "I love anarchy with young love - joyfully";
ARBAT - “and Russia was, but now.”

Some abbreviations refer to certain values that are important for the entire declassed society or for an individual member (love, family, freedom, honor, etc.):

ALENKA - “and you need to love her like an angel”;
BLICSS - "cherish love and value freedom";
DMNTP - “for me there is no more beautiful you.”

It is also possible to single out such a group of abbreviations that directly relate to the state, to the judici althe process, the territorial location of the prisoner, etc. For example: HORN - "the state doomed (c) slaves forever." This also includes the aforementioned abbreviations SLON and BOSS.

Polysemy and options for decoding abbreviations

Deciphering prison abbreviations is of great linguistic interest to philologists. As you yourself have already noticed, the same abbreviation can have several meanings.

So it was due to the influence of a complex of factors - the moment of history, time, territory and others. Abbreviations of prison tattoos have been appearing and accumulating over the years, and now their number is more than a hundred. However, some of them are ambiguous, which speaks of the, perhaps, partly dubious, subcultural richness and originality of a declassed society.

Prison abbreviations have become a large layer in modern linguistics and are of particular interest for study. After all, it is still not completely clear why they arose and how. Why do they have this particular semantic meaning and not another? Philologists still have a lot to learn, and also to see how the abbreviations prison and criminal will change with the course of our time. And they cannot but change, since everything is subject to the influence of social external and internal factors.