There is a version that the Russian word “garbage” comes from the Latin Hernia - “hernia”, and “suffering a garbage” used to mean “suffer a hernia”. We checked whether this is really so.

Such versions can often be seen in different social networks. Some of them even accompany detailed stories about how the Latin Hernia turned into a Russian “garbage”.

According to one of them, told At the Picabu, once in the 19th century, the sailor after loading the boxes fell ill with a stomach. But there was no Russian -speaking doctor nearby, but there was only an Englishman. They were explained by gestures, and the doctor, having advised the lying regimen, gave the sailor a note with a diagnosis that he gave to the midshipman:

"To eat!" - The midshipman is surprised: "Some kind of garbage is written!" The sailor goes to itself. He waves his hand to questions about the disease: "Ah ... garbage!"
In general, he sits on a bay with a cable and smokes all the way home. Sailors are talking: "You see, a man sits and suffers a trick!"
But the day before arriving in Kronstadt, the sailor dies from terrible abdominal pain. Everyone on the lips: "Some kind of garbage died ..."
So gradually the unknown word diverges through the fleet and begins to go to the masses. Meanwhile, the very note was brought to one officer who knows English, in order to still satisfy his curiosity. He said to the brought: "This, father, is not a garbage! This is a Herni-a hernia in our opinion" ".

One of the popular publications, which tells a similar version of the origin of the word "garbage", I went out In 2014, in the magazine Maxim: the authors collected 20 words and expressions with an interesting history of origin and included in the list the phrase “suffer a garbage”. The version of the magazine sounded like this:

“... it became obscene and a common expression with a similar root -“ suffer a garbage ”. Hernia in Latin means "hernia", and it was this diagnosis of good military doctors who most often exposed to children wealthy bourgeois, who did not want to serve in the army. Every fifth city dweller in Russia at the end of the 19th century properly suffered a garbage (the peasants of the garbage were most often not affordable, and they were blocked much more actively). ”

In English and Latin, the word Hernia really means "hernia." But with the Russian "garbage" everything is not so simple, since it is euphemism.

As the linguist, chief researcher at the Institute of the Russian Language and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Dmitry Dobrovolsky, the consonance of the Latin Hernia and the Russian Herni, explained. Perhaps the doctors professionally mastered this consonance for a language game and jokes, but the word has a different etymology. In the Russian language, the word “garbage” is included in a series of euphemisms used to replace the obscene word “x **”.

"Dick" - so before It was called The letter "x" in church and old-Slavonic languages. From this name the letter, for example, is happening The word "poach", which meant to put on something cross, since the letter "dick" is like a cross.

The word “garbage” occurred in a similar way: from the name of the letter of the alphabet, because it was this letter that replaced the obscene word “x **”.

“This is a well -known and practiced way to form euphemisms,” explains Dmitry Dobrovolsky. - When a word that a person wants to avoid in speech, because it is obscene, is replaced by the first letter of the word. For example, if they say "she is so B ...", everyone will understand what is meant. Also when they said "this is dick", everyone understood that this first letter replaced the indecent word of three letters with the letter "x". "

According to the linguist, the assumption that the word "garbage" comes from the word Hernia extremely strange, because this word is formed according to the same principle as other similar euphemisms.

“There is a large word -formation nest with the word“ dick ”, which completely repeats the word -formation nests of all euphemisms and not euphemisms of the word from which the word“ dick ”comes. It can be shown on the example of another euphemism, for example, “FIG”: “Fuck” - “HOW”, “FIRST” - “SEAR”, “FIVO” - “Cherrovo”, “Ground” - “garbage”, ”Dobrovolsky explains.

Thus, the word "garbage" does not come from the Latin Hernia, and their consonance is a simple coincidence.