Russian puns: we embrace you to the limits

Hello my dear students, I hope you like Maxim!
What are we going to do with a magazine that publishes pictures of naked girls? – you might ask. Honestly? I have no idea! You may do anything you like with the magazine (after the lesson only), but I will tell you about the ‘puns’ that are very common in Maxim article headings.

A pun is a play on words. In Maxim Russian puns usually make no sense, but they are fun.

So here we have an example of Russian puns: «Свой в тезку!». It comes from a similar sounding expression «свой в доску». The expression «свой в доску» means that someone is very… Don’t know how to explain it really… It means that someone is really «СВОЙ». «Свой» can be translated like ‘my/his/her/their own’.

Maxim the Magazine is the greatest book for Russian learners. Just open it and you will see it for yourself.

If you say «свой в доску» about someone, you mean that this person is very suited to certain company, groups or certain kinds of people, like in this environment, ‘are natural’. ‘Do you know how Nick is doing at his new job?’ – ‘Oh, it seems like he has made good friends with everyone already.’ That’s when you can say «свой в доску»: «Он там свой в доску уже». Similar to the English expression ‘like a duck to water’.

It means that some community or a company or a circle accepts this guy completely as one of them.

The dictionary gives us such options: ‘one of the boys’, ‘hail-fellow-well-met’, ‘a good egg’ (‘a good egg’, what fun!).

I hope it’s a bit clearer about «свой в доску». The heading «Свой в тезку» is a pun. «Тезка» means ‘namesake’ and the article is about people having the same names – actually not people, but a singer with a name MakSim and her photo-session in Maxim-magazine. It’s a play on words meaning that ‘we are not just namesakes, but really nice fellows to each other, we accept each other just fine.’

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