It Will Heal in Time for the Wedding

Hi, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello. Hi, my name is Yasha Terrico, and I’m calling from Charleston, South Carolina.

Yasha?

Yes, Yasha, like Sasha with a Y.

So, yeah, I grew up, actually, my family moved to the U.S. as refugees back in the 80s from Ukraine and from communist Russia.

And so we grew up speaking, we actually spoke Russian, and later I learned Ukrainian.

But growing up, my father would often say this thing, this phrase to us.

It usually happened when one of us would fall down or something and get hurt.

And he’d kind of comfort us a little bit and say, the phrase he would say is,

Which translates to, like, it’ll heal in time for the wedding.

Or like, yeah, in time for the wedding, this will heal.

Which I just thought was a basic sort of Slavic phrase.

Maybe the Russian family said it, or I wasn’t quite sure that there was much history there.

And then in the last maybe decade or so of my life, I’ve been visiting and moved to Charleston, South Carolina.

And I met a family who’s been here for quite a long time.

Their ancestors have been in Charleston for some generations.

And this gentleman, this American guy, said to his son one time, I was with them over a bonfire.

His son fell over and same sort of thing.

He said to him the same exact phrase, but in English.

And I thought, well, that’s fascinating.

I thought this was only like a Slavic phrase, maybe just an expression perhaps from a town or just a nice thing to say.

I didn’t know it had any other sort of application around the world anywhere.

So I was curious about that history.

So you’ve done a little bit of fieldwork.

I love this.

So just to recap, when a kid gets injured and gets an owie or a boo-boo, the parent who doesn’t take it, doesn’t think it’s serious, says something along the lines of, don’t worry, it’ll heal in time for the wedding.

Right.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And so give it to us again in Russian or Ukrainian?

So, yeah, I grew up speaking Russian.

So in Russian, it’s desvangibly, desvigilat, which the direct translation is like, in time for the wedding, it’ll heal, essentially.

Yeah, so it’s a European-wide proverb.

So I have found this in the following languages, English, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, French, Spanish, Polish, Greek, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Portuguese.

And I have no doubt that it’s also in other European languages.

At some point, I just stopped looking.

Yeah.

And we indirectly referred to this.

How long ago was that, Martha?

Maybe 10 years ago, referred to this saying.

And we got a really nice email from Marina,

Who she also called to talk about it,

That she knows the expression.

She’s Russian by heritage.

And that it can also be used to encourage young people

To keep their stamina positive

And to focus on a future objective and not worry about a current problem.

So not just for when you get a boo-boo, but when you have any kind of minor bump in the road.

Yeah, interesting.

There are other variants.

I’ve seen the Hungarians sometimes say, by the time you become a soldier, it will be gone.

So if there’s some inconvenience or a little boo-boo.

And in Turkish, they say the more general, you’ll forget about it by the time you grow up.

Yeah, well, it’s fascinating.

I just didn’t know.

I, you know, I’ve never thought about some of these expressions.

I know there are many colloquialisms in sort of English and obviously in Slavic languages.

My mom uses a lot.

But I didn’t think it was a colloquialism or even like that kind of a thought.

I just thought it was a general nice sort of, you know, it’ll be all right.

Yasha, what you’ve come across is something that people often forget.

European culture is incredibly, even though it’s also diverse, it has huge cores and foundations

In it that are shared across all the peoples in Europe, from Moscow to Madrid, you know,

From Sardinia to Scotland. There’s a lot that’s shared there.

Yeah. And little kids fall down and skin their knees all over the world, you know,

And you want to take their mind off of it.

It’s such a jarring thing, right?

It kind of takes your mind off the little bloody knee.

Thank you so much for bringing this to us, Yasha.

We really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thank you.

All right. Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

What’s the saying you always heard growing up

That you just can’t quite figure out?

You can talk to us about it at 877-929-9673.