my comrade

I've got a new Internet penpal in Russia. Her English is good -lucky for me. But I wanted to learn a little Russian which was why I asked for a Russian penpal in case you were wondering. Reading Cyrillic is a basic requirement for history of modern art. I learned the Cyrillic alphabet a long time ago to read the messages on revolutionary posters from the Bolshevic era. I didn't have much use for writing Russian. Now I do. So, I broke out the extra language function in Windows and the on-screen keyboard. The Cyrillic keyboard is totally confusing. I have to hunt-and-click evey letter. But it works. Learning a bit of Russian is well worth the effort. There are many common words in use in English taken directly from Russian. My latest discovery followed my attempt to write "friend." It's written like this in Cyrillic:

друг

That's pronounced "droog." That's an odd word for friend. Yhe funny thing is, it reminded me of the word used by the punk character in Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange." He called his mates "Droogs." I always thought it referred to "drugs." Silly me. He called his mates "droogs" because they were his comrades.