Pood

Pood (pronounced pood or poot (Russian))

(1) An old Russian unit of mass, equal to 40 Russian funt, or about 16.38 kg (36.11 lb).

(2) A Russian unit of mass used for kettlebells (a hand-held weight used in physical training and competition), now rounded off to 16 kg (35.274 lb pounds).

(3) In computing, as POOD, (principle of orthogonal design), a model of database design with parameters designed to avoid redundancies and duplicated routines.

1100s: From the Russian пуд (pud), from Low German or Old Norse pund (pound) (unit of weight and measure), from the Late Latin pondo (by weight; in weight), from the Classical Latin pondus (weight, heaviness, density), From the Proto-Italic pondos, from the primitive Indo-European spénd-os & pénd-os, from spend- and pend-..  A doublet of pound, the alternative spelling was poud.  Pood is a noun; the noun plural is poods (pudi or pudy in Russian).

Instructions for using a 1 pood kettlebell.

Under comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953), the pood, like other units of weight defined by the system used in Imperial Russia, officially was abolished in 1924 but, beyond the big cities, the old ways remained in wide use until the 1950s and, for informal transactions (which at times constituted a substantial part of the Soviet economy) it really went extinct only as the older generations died off.  One quirk however remains, the weight of the traditional Russian kettlebells (a hand-held weight used in physical training and competition), cast in multiples and fractions of 16 kg (the metric version of the pood), the 8 kg ketterbell a ½ pood, a 24 kg a 1½ pood.  Informally, among traders, bulk agricultural communities such as grain, potatoes and beets are sometimes expressed in poods, reputedly because the sacks used in retail distribution are still made in sizes in which quantities such as 8, 16, 32, 48 & 64 kg can conveniently be bagged.

1 pood kettlebells in the shape of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s head, Heavy Metal Shop, Moscow.

Had all the relevant evidence been presented in court when Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) was tried before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg (1945-1946) he’d likely have been hanged but as it was, convicted on counts 3 (war crimes) and 4 (crimes against humanity) he was sentenced to twenty years, most of which were served in Spandau Prison.  In there, he wrote the notes for what became his not wholly reliable but still valuable memoir and a prison diary.  Selectively edited, The Spandau Diary (1975) was one of the minor classics of the genre, not least because it was probably more helpful than all the many reports by psychologists and psychiatrists in assessing whether his fellow inmate Rudolf Hess (1894–1987; Nazi deputy führer 1933-1941) was mad, either during his trial or subsequently.  It was also a rich source of the type of anecdotes which distinguish prison journals, one of which came from a Soviet guards who, after Speer observed to him the new Soviet prison director “didn’t seem so bad”, recited an old Russian proverb: Человека узнаешь, когда с ним пуд соли съешь which he translated as “you do not know a man until you have used up a pood of salt with him”.  Speer, then in the fourteenth year of his sentence, was interested enough to look up just how much a pood weighed but didn’t comment further.  As other prison diaries have noted, guards provide much practical advice.  A year earlier, resting in bed with a swollen knee, he mentioned to one of the Soviet guards that the Russian doctor had prescribed two aspirins a day.  Knowing the guard to be “a veterinarian on the side”, he asked how a horse with a swollen knee should be treated.  “If horse cheap, shoot dead.  If good horse, give aspirin” he was told.  Again, Speer added no comment.

Khlebosolyn: Young ladies in traditional dress presenting bread and salt to a visitor.

Quite how long it would take two chaps to work their way through 16 kg odd (35 lb) of salt is geographically and culturally variable.  In a modern Western household, that quantity of salt would typically last years and while after that long two people should be well acquainted with each other’s foibles, in pre-Modern Russia, a pood might have been absorbed more quickly.  For one thing, in the pre-refrigeration age, salt was often used in bulk to cure and preserve food including meant and fish and that was sometimes necessary even in Russia’s colder parts and there was also much boiling of food in salt water.  Prized since Antiquity, highly taxed in Imperial Russia and therefore expensive, salt was also an important part of cultural tradition.  A ritual invoked when greeting important guests was to present on the table a loaf of bread, placed upon a rushnyk (an elaborately embroidered cloth), atop which was placed a salt cellar.  The ceremony is the origin of the Russian word khlebosolny (literally “bready-salty”) which expresses someone’s hospitality, bread and salt traditional symbols of prosperity and good health.  So, salt consumption in old Russia was quite a bit higher than in modernity (not counting the high levels in processed food) and the consensus is the proverb probably means people truly don’t know anyone until they’ve spent a year or more together.

Pood is wholly unrelated to poodle (a dog breed dating from 1808), from the German Pudel, a shortened form of Pudelhund (water dog), the construct being the Low German Pudel (puddle) (related to pudeln (to splash) and the Modern English puddle) + the + German Hund (hound; dog).  The origin in German is thought related to the dogs originally being used to hunt water fowl, but in England and North America, it was always a term for an undersized fancy or toy dog with long, curly hair.  The essentially decorative qualities of the diminutive canine meant that in UK the figurative sense of "lackey" emerged in 1907, perhaps derived from the British army slang “poodle-faker”, defined in the slang dictionaries of the age as “an ingratiating” but thought always used euphemistically as a gay slur.  Despite legislative reform which removed all legal prohibitions on homosexual acts, that sense survived into twenty-first Australia to be used on the floor of the parliament by Julia Gillard (b 1961; Australian prime minister 2010-2013), later famous for her “misogyny speech” which deplored sexism and sexist language (when aimed at her).  In 2009, she used the imagery of “mincing” & “poodle” as a slur against another (male, married and with four children) parliamentarian who was admittedly really annoying and needlessly neat and tidy but it was a slur nonetheless.

The mincing poodle tapes.

Kitsch

Kitsch (pronounced kich)

(1) Something though tawdry in design or appearance; an object created to appeal to popular sentiment or undiscriminating tastes, especially if cheap (and thus thought a vulgarity).

(2) Art, decorative objects and other forms of representation of dubious artistic or aesthetic value (many consider this definition too wide).

1926: From the German kitsch (literally “gaudy, trash”), from the dialectal kitschen (to coat; to smear) which in the nineteenth century was used (as a German word) in English in art criticism describe a work as “something thrown together”.  Among “progressive” critics, there was a revival in the 1930s to contrast anything thought conservative or derivative with the avant garde.  The adjective kitchy was first noted in 1965 though it may earlier have been in oral use; the noun kitchiness soon followed. Camp is sometimes used as a synonym and the two can be interchangeable but the core point of camp is that it attributes seriousness to the trivial and trivializes the serious.  Technically, the comparative is kitscher and the superlative kitschest but the more general kitschy is much more common.  The alternative spelling kitch is simply a mistake and was originally 1920s slang for “kitchen” the colloquial shortening dating from 1919.  Kitsch & kitchiness are nouns, kitschify, kitschifying & kitschified are verbs and kitschy is an adjective; the noun plural is kitsch (especially collectively) or kitsches.  Kitschesque is non-standard.

Kitsch can become ironic.  Lava lamps were in the 1970s briefly fashionable as symbols of the modern but were soon re-classified kitsch.  In the twenty-first century, such was the demand that re-creations of the originals became available, bought because they were so kitsch.

For something that lacks and exact definition, kitsch is probably surprisingly well-understood as a concept although not all would agree on what objects are kitsch and what are not.  Nor does is there always a sense about it of a self-imposed exclusionary rule; there are many who cherish objects they happily acknowledge are kitsch.  As a general principle, kitsch is used to describe art, objects or designs thought to be in poor taste or overly sentimental.  Objects condemned as kitsch are often mass-produced, clichéd, gaudy (the term “bling” might have been invented for the kitsch) or cheap imitations of something.  It can take some skill to adopt the approach but other items which can compliments such a thing include rotary dial phones and three ceramic ducks flying up the wall (although when lava lamps were in vogue, lava lamp buyers probably already thought the kitsch.

Lindsay Lohan: Prom Queen scene in Mean Girls (2004).  If rendered in precious metal and studded with diamonds a tiara is not kitsch but something which is the same design but made with anodized plastic and acrylic Rhinestones certainly is.

Führer kitsch: A painting attributed to Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi regime devoted much attention to spectacle and representational architecture and art was a particular interest of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945).  Hitler in his early adulthood had been a working artist, earning a modest living from his brush while living in Vienna in the years before World War I (1914-1918) and his landscapes and buildings were, if lifeless and uninspired, competent enough to attract buyers.  He was rejected by the academy because he could never master a depiction of the human form, his faces especially lacking, something which has always intrigued psychoanalysts, professional and amateur.  Still, while his mind was completely closed to any art of which he didn’t approve, he was genuinely knowledgeable about many schools of art and better than many he knew what was kitsch.  However, the nature of the “Führer state” meant he had to see much of it because the personality cult built around him encouraged a deluge of Hitler themed pictures, statuettes, lampshades, bedspreads, cigarette lighters and dozens of other items.  A non-smoker, he ordered a crackdown on things like ashtrays but generally the flow of kitsch continued unabated until the demands of the wartime economy prevailed.  In the Berghof, his alpine headquarters on the Bavarian Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden, there were constant deliveries of things likes cushions embroidered with swastikas in which would now be called designer colors and more than one of his contemporaries in their memoirs recorded that the gifs sometimes would be accompanied by suggestive photographs and offers of marriage.  Truly that was “working towards the Führer”.

Führer kitsch: A painting attributed to Adolf Hitler.

Hitler dutifully acknowledged the many paintings which were little more than regime propaganda although the only works for which he showed any real enthusiasm were those which truly he found beautiful.  However, he knew there was a place for the kitsch… for others.  In July 1939, while being shown around an exhibition staged in Munich called the “Day of German Art”, he complained to the curator that some German artist were not on display and after being told they were “in the cellar”, demanded to know why.  The only one with sufficient strength of character to answer was Frau Gerhardine "Gerdy" Troost (1904–2003), the widow of the Nazi’s first court architect Paul Troost (1878–1934) and one of a handful of women with whom Hitler was prepared to discuss anything substantive.  “Because it’s kitsch” she answered.  Hitler sacked the curatorial committee and appointed his photographer to supervise the exhibition and the depictions of farm-workers in the field and heroic nude warriors returned.

Kitsch: One knows it when one sees it.

What is kitsch will be obvious to some while others will remain oblivious and the disagreements will happen not only at the margins.  Although there will be sensitive souls appalled at the notion, it really is something wholly subjective and the only useful guide is probably to borrow and adapt the threshold test for obscenity coined by Justice Potter Stewart (1915–1985; associate justice of the US Supreme Court 1958-1981) in Jacobellis v Ohio (1964):

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…

Kitsch also has a history also of becoming something else.  As recently as the 1970s, tea-towels, placemats, oven mitts, serving trays and plenty else was available in the West adorned with depictions of indigenous peoples, often as racist tropes or featuring the appropriation of culturally sensitive symbols.  These are now regarded as kitsch only historically and have been re-classified as examples variously (depending on the content) of cultural insensitivity or blatant racism.