Let's think about the verb одеваться/одеться. It conjugates like this:

The verb means “to get dressed.” If the item of clothing is specified, then it occurs in the accusative case after the preposition в:

If one person dresses another, then the non-reflexive form of the verb is used:

You know how there are certain rules of language you are taught in school that absolutely everyone violates? One of those rules is you absolutely musn't use одевать/одеть to mean "to put an item of clothing on (oneself)." The Russians violate this rule like crazy. Absolutely everybody from news anchors to professors to welders makes this mistake, so in the press you can see things like:

In that sense you are supposed to use надевать/надеть, thus the previous sentence should have been written «Анжелина Джоли надела платье задом наперед». (See tomorrow's entry for details on how to use that verb.)

Today I'd like to write about пирожки (singular пирожок), a word maybe as famous as матрёшка , although the former belongs to the food category and is not a souvenir as the latter. Russian cuisine is famous for its doughy things, and пирожки are among them. Basically, it is dough with filling inside. The filling can be anything: berries, mushrooms, roots, vegetables… anything you wish to put in there. The dough is not a simple dough, however, but a little complicated to make, and it takes time to master the skill of preparing it. In Russian it is called сдобное тесто. Recipes vary, but the thing they all have in common is that they have yeast, and and the dough takes time to rise. Many great Russian authors, e.g. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Paustovsky, and Turgenev, numerous times mention in their writings the process of making the dough for pirozhki (or for bliny, like Сhehov, who wrote a special short story about it, «О бренности»; see «Как испечь блины по-чеховски?» for details . K. Paustovsky in his autobiographical novel «Повесть о жизни/Розовые олеандры» discusses the making of куличи (a type of пирожки for Easter), and he calls the process of preparing the dough священнодействием а sacred act:

I myself remember the same kind of feistiness over making dough for kulichi. Maybe it is because kulichi are for Easter, and because of the religious connotation, extra care was needed. Usually for regular pirozhki it is much less demanding! Kulichi don't have a filling; they are made in oval molds and have raisins inside. Pirozhki have the filling, as I mentionned above, and here each chooses each own! My all time favorites are two kinds: pirozhki with eggs and green onions, and pirozhki with apples. One has to boil a few eggs, and then finely chop them with green onions, and add salt and pepper. For the kind with apples I stew finely chopped applles with water and sugar for about forty minutes, making sure they stay moist, adding water if necessary, and then put them in pirozhki. The last trick (but not the least!): do not forget to baste your pirozhki with egg (beat one egg with a whisk for basting) before baking, it will add such glamour to your pirozhki that they will be hard to resist, just like in that picture! Actually, the pirozhki in the picture I made myself for a party at my house, they turned out very delicious, and everyone liked them!

Good luck with making your own pirozhki, and

ПРИЯТНОГО АППЕТИТА ! BON APPETIT !

Let's think about the verb помогать/помочь. It conjugates like this:

The main meaning of the verb is “to help, give aid to,” and the person receiving the help appears in the dative case. The action which the subject helped the indirect object to do appears in an infinitive phrase:

Ушная сера means earwax, and a glob of that stuff that impedes your hearing is called ушная пробка “an ear clog.” Often the Russians will simply leave out the ушная part and just say сера or пробка. I really couldn't care less about this phrase, but the other day one of my students was given an assignment to write a bunch of phrases starting with «спасибо за» “thanks for,” and he came up with:

The phrase is grammatically perfect, so I can't take off any points. But by God, for that kind of disrespectful composition, I'm surely going to stiff him on his final grade, подлец the bum.

Let's think about the verb ложиться/лечь. The first thing to notice is that it is one of only four verbs in Russian where the imperfective is reflexive and the perfective is not.¹ It conjugates like this:

The primary meaning of the verb is “to lie” in the sense of “to lie down.” The first thing to notice is that the thing you lie down on appears in the accusative case after the preposition на:

It's also possible to lie under something под + accusative:

We often find this verb in is in combination with спать. The resulting phrase means “to go to bed.”

¹ You get extra points if you can name the three other verbs. Lots of people can name two others, but if you get three others, you are special. Add a comment to this post to prove your prowess!

² The verb “to lie” in the sense of “to lie down” is currently shifting in English. The old standard for the past is to say “Yesterday I lay on the couch after lunch because my head hurt” and the standard for the infinitive can be seen in “My head hurts, and I need to lie down.” In modern American English now people often say “Yesterday I laid down on the couch after lunch” and “My head hurts, and I need to lay down.” This verb is one my personal pet peeves in life, and I'm going to defend the old literary norm either to my dying die or to the day my sister finally admits she has been saying it wrong all these years, whichever comes first.

Death seems to be a-comin’ awful fast.