Goof. The meaning and origin of the expression

Many idiomatic phrases sound impressive. They are used in the usual sense, and few people think about the original meaning of the words that form their basis. Sitting on a koukan means not having enough freedom of movement. What kind of a doll is this? Maybe it's something indecent? No, the usual fishing term, meaning a rope or fishing line, on which the catch is tied, splashing in the water for the time being.

And here is another expression - "get into a slack". The meaning of the phrase-forming word is treated differently, although the general meaning is clear to all. To be in an uncomfortable and awkward situation, to become the object of unflattering discussion, to show inattention, which caused trouble - that's what everyone means by using the expression "get into a trivial".

The culture of modern speech, unfortunately, too often relies on phraseology, borrowed from the lexicon of the lumpenized layers of society. For some time, the use of obscenities has become a special glamor among representatives of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia, both technical and creative. There are several reasons for this phenomenon. Most of this "layer" was held a few decades ago by the severe school of camp imprisonment and learned many turns from its neighbors in barracks, while others, aiming to be known as experienced people, also began to use jargon in colloquial speech. As a result, the words of a rather innocuous initial meaning got at times an ambiguous interpretation.

So it happened with the expression "get into a trivial". Its meaning is that a person, distracted or thinking about something extraneous, did not follow the movement of fibers, filaments or bundles, woven on a special mechanism in strong ropes. Actually, the drawback is this machine, which is quite complex in its structure, on which wire rigging was made in Peter's times. Modern rope technologies are also unsafe and require attention, but about three hundred years ago any oversight led to sad consequences. If the threads were intertwined, then nothing else: the beard will pull or the sleeve will tear, and if - the strands, then the matter could end in tragedy. It will tighten the worker in tight ropes and will strike - that's what it means to get into a slack. At least that's how our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers understood this.

For more than two centuries the circulation of the expression "get into a triviality", its meaning remained the same, and the royal censorship did not discern any obscenity in it. Dictionary Dal gave him a completely logical and orderly justification.

Unfortunately, the thrust of modern Russian speakers to the search for Freudian associations is so strong that it deserves a different, more worthy application. In one of the movies of the past decade, under the title "Blind Man" (also a word used in a new sense), an extremely vulgar explanation of the phrase "get into a triviality" is given. Its meaning, according to the character, has nothing to do with cable production.

Such "enlightenment" can lead to the exclusion of speech speech quite decent and having folk roots of phraseology. It is not ruled out that other harmless phrases will soon become shy in a decent society.