The gory bells have rung for a leader with balls of iron

Late former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has been widely lauded this week for his contribution to world peace.

His additions to the English language — mainly perestroika (restructuring, particularly by adopting some features of a market economy) and glasnost (openness, particularly a loosening of state censorship of the media) — have also been recognised.

But Gorby’s favourite words were merely two foot soldiers in the Russian invasion of English. 

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In 1986 cult film Withnail and I, struggling actor Withnail gripes: “Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow.”

Were it not for Russian playwrights, authors, philosophers and politicians, however, we would not have balalaikas, parkas, gulags, samovars or the game of bridge. Imagine a world without troikas, apparatchiks, intelligentsia, shamans, samizdat, misinformation, mammoth or sable. Imagine, if you can, a world without vodka.

Incidentally, Gorbachev was initially known in his homeland as “the marked one”. This did not mean that there was a contract on his head. It did have some bearing on the bear-shaped port wine birthmark that distinguished his forehead, but it was also a nod to his profound reforms.

When reform did not translate into wealth for all, the tone of the nickname changed, with poverty-stricken citizens complaining about the marked one’s constant mark-ups in sales tax.

Neither gore nor gory have anything to do with Gorby, though it can be claimed that his country has witnessed and been the cause of a somewhat excessive amount of gore over the ages.

There was an earlier blip, when Gorbachev delayed informing the public about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This earned him the nickname, “the stained leader”, but that mostly wore off when he started doing what most of the world considered to be Good Things.

Because of these, in many Western countries he has been fondly known as “Gorby” since the early 1990s.

Anyone who knows the Scottish city of Glasgow (or anyone who has read either of Booker-prize-winning author Douglas Stuart’s novels) will know the word “Gorbals”.

This has nothing to do with Gorby (though the man certainly had balls of iron). It is the name of an area on the south side of Glasgow, near the River Clyde, that was once synonymous with slums and extreme hardship.

Speaking of the Scots, they have a language that sometimes sounds like English but can also be the source of extreme bewilderment to any English speaker. To mention just two examples, in Scotland “messages” means groceries and “greet” means to cry, sob or wail.

There are arguments about how the Gorbals part of Glasgow got its name. Historians on the website Glasgow Live dispute the myth that the name comes from “gory bells”. This theory refers to the fact that in the 1400s a hospital to house lepers was built in this area. When the lepers wished to enter town, they would allegedly announce their presence by ringing bells provided for the occasion. Like all good stories, or gory stories, this one has stuck.

“Gory”, by the way, comes from “gore”, a Germanic-derived word that originally meant dung or filth but has been used in English since the 1500s to describe thick clotted blood, and more recently gruesome scenes of bodily violence in films and books.

Neither gore nor gory have anything to do with Gorby, though it can be claimed his country has witnessed and been the cause of a somewhat excessive amount of gore over the ages.

Gorby himself was opposed to gory ways of getting things done. He not only gave us an end to the Cold War and some satisfying new words, he also left some extremely quotable quotes. My favourite is this:

“If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.”