The word икра has several meanings in Russian. The first one that comes to mind is caviar, which means fish eggs. Russians love caviar. In the US it's a rare family that buys caviar, but in Russia it's very common to buy caviar for parties. It's considered a treat and a way of showing your guests that you are a host that will go all out for them. It is either put in a bowl from which the guests serve themselves with a small spoon, or it is set upon pieces of bread with butter.

The most common type of caviar to buy is красная икра red caviar. Sometimes red caviar consists of light orange eggs, each of which is a bit bigger than the plastic head of a sewing pin.
	Sometimes it is larger salmon eggs that resemble the “Balls o' Fire” bait used in the US for fishing.
Sometimes it is чёрная икра black caviar, which is small gray-black sturgeon eggs and is the most expensive kind.

A quick look on the web shows that you can easily pay over a hundred dollars an ounce for caviar, and I've even seen it priced at nearly two hundred dollars an ounce:

What could be odder than paying $200 for a tiny mass of fish eggs? Why, smearing it on your face for cosmetic effect, of course:

When my fellow blogger Таня saw this picture, she said, “I just want to lick that caviar off her face!” Thanks a million, Таня. That's an image I won't be able to get out of my mind for weeks.

Here are a few sample sentences:

Wow, those Italians… feeding caviar to the poor. I'm moving to Milan.

The word for nothing in Russian is ничто. Grammatically we call it a negative pronoun, and as a pronoun of course it occurs in all six cases:

The first curious thing to note about the word is that you rarely encounter the nominative case form; instead you often find the genitive. For instance, if you wanted to say “nothing helped,” you might expect the translation to be «ничто не помогло». That is a perfectly grammatical sentence, but more often you would hear something like this:

That's not to say you won't ever see ничто. Back around 1997 there was an advertising campaign in Russia for Sprite. It began with posters of sexy models that said «Имидж ничто…» “Image is nothing…” and followed a while later by another set of posters with sexy models that said «Жажда всё» “Thirst is everything.” I remember being confused when I saw the first set of signs because they had nothing about Sprite on them, but weeks later I understood it when the second set of signs appeared that included Sprite images. Apparently the campaign worked: even a decade later you can still find people playing with the phrase. For instance, at the beginning of this month there was an article on podrobnosti.ru entitled «Имидж ничто, ответственоость всё» “Image is nothing; responsibility is everything.” The phrase has even penetrated popular humor:

“Image is nothing; thirst is everything. I won't let myself dry out.”

It's worth remembering that once you put a form of ничто in a sentence, you must also include the negative particle не before the verb. And if ничто is the object of a preposition, the ни separates from the rest of the word and moves in front of the preposition:

In conversation ничего acquires a wide range of meanings:

Thus in the end nothing means a lot of different things. Ironic.

In English we have some little rhyming phrases that people occasionally throw in conversations for cutesy effect. For instance, when saying goodbye, you might hear:

Russian is not bereft of its cutesy moments as well:

«Привет-буфет» is a relatively recent phrase. Older Russians may not know it. «Здорово, корова» has been around a long time.

The phrase силиконовая грудь means silicon breast [implant]. You are not likely to need one of these in Russia, but I had to blog about it because I came across this headline and story the other day:

Another headline reveals that silicon breast implants may also protect you from terrorism:

Perhaps if our previous President George W. Bush had known this, he could have set up a breast implant division of the Depart­ment of Homeland Security. Really, ladies, get your implants now: it's just another way you can participate in making America safe. The one downside, I suppose, is that the implant will prevent you from going into outer space:

¹ ДТП = дорожно-транспортное происшествие traffic accident (lit. road-transportation incident)

Грудь is a feminine noun that means bosom in the sense of chest or breast(s). It's mostly used in the singular, even when talking about women's breasts. Although sometimes you'll hear people stress the word a bit differently in the singular, the most common stress pattern for the noun is:

Sample sentences:

Грудь is also used as a symbol of the center of one's feelings and desires just as heart is used in English: