I’ve taken a look at the analytics.
When people hear Rusev udrya Rusev machka they hear udrya as mudria, kidrya, pudrya, and budrya.
An impressive number of hits to my earlier writings suggest that the search engine gods have deemed me an internet expert on this topic. I couldn’t be more proud. In a month and a half my original Rusev post has more than 200 hits. For some nerd’s literary wrestling blog that’s less than a year old, it’s an impressive number. Every day there are a few hits for On What Rusev is Saying, and big spikes during every RAW, Smackdown, or pay-per-view. It is the third most popular post on this blog.
In case you’re just tuning in, here is my translation: “Rusev hit Rusev crush.” I saw Rusev tweet it as Русев удря Русев мачка and poked around on Google Translate and the Russian dictionary website where I spend a lot of time when I’m working on my translation projects (it’s Bulgarian, but that site helps me figure out all Slavic languages). Rusev wrote it with no punctuation like that so I’ve been writing it as such, but some people search for it with exclamation points: Русев удря! Русев мачка! That must be written somewhere on his webpage or something. It makes more sense, but there’s something funny about him sounding like a punctuation-less hulking troll.
The person who wrote kidrya spelled it out in Bulgarian: къдря, which is funny, because this would mean “Rusev curl Rusev crush”. As thought Rusev curls somebody’s hair before he crushes them, best as I can tell. (A note to any Slavic language scholars who happen to wander in: don’t you just love discovering a ъ in the wild like that? Maybe there are more tvyordi znaki in Bulgarian, though.)
It’s curious, isn’t it, that Rusev’s motto is so hard to understand and make sense of? I wonder if the WWE is being intentionally obtuse here. Is the WWE’s choice to use Bulgarian as a key part of Rusev’s gimmick an attempt to make him appealing to the broader international audience somehow? Or was this a branding snafu for Rusev, that the Russian heel says something so unclear in Bulgarian? Now it is legendary, he says what he says, but I do wonder why he says it the way he says it.
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