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Like most of the world, I recently watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

The scene where Ayo recites the Winter Soldier’s activation phrase and Bucky finally realizes that he can no longer be controlled through Hydra’s programming of his subconscious mind is one of the most powerful pieces of writing and acting that I have seen in a very long time. I was rewatching it earlier and I had to pause and just sit with the emotions for a moment because it was such a phenomenal payoff to the arc that the character has been on.

Something jumped out at me, though, about the words themselves. 

Not in the “what Marvel Easter eggs can I find?” way, but in the “how was this translated and why?” and “what are some deeper implications of what these words evoke as related to this specific character?” ways.

I have some observations that some of you – especially the fanfic writers – are really going to want to know about for their intriguing storytelling potential, including a massive continuity error that I discovered in Captain America: Civil War while cross-referencing for this piece.

Full disclosure/disclaimer before we continue: I am not a native Russian speaker. I am a native English speaker who studied some Russian in university as part of my linguistics degree, and who is passionate about both languages and storytelling. I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years continuing to learn, but I am by no means fluent and there are definitely plenty of aspects of the language that I don’t know, don’t understand, or don’t have a good feel for. To cover my bases since I don’t currently know any native Russian speakers to consult on this, I have cross-referenced my personal feelings about these words with several reference texts in my personal library, including:

• Leveraging Your Russian with Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes by Gary Browning, David K Hart, and Raisa Solovyova
• Russian Etymological Dictionary by Terence Wade
• A Frequency Dictionary of Russian by Serge Sharoff, Elena Umanskaya, and James Wilson
• Collins Russian Concise Dictionary

I would also like to invite any native Russian speakers to comment on this series, and to let me know if they have thoughts that differ. 

In any event, even if I do get some of the specific Russian details incorrect, my point throughout this series – and probably this entire blog – is simple: words mean things.

I know; I know – that’s obvious. Right?

Except one of the biggest things that I’ve noticed throughout my life, both personally and in my professional experience first as a translation project manager and then as a technical writer, is that most of us don’t think very carefully about the full set of baggage that any given word carries when we’re choosing which ones to use. Sure, when we’re writing misdirection or innuendo, we’re all about finding the exact right way to put things, but the rest of the time? Not so much. The result is that our writing – our communication in general – is far less effective and impactful than it could be.

So what does this have to do with the Winter Soldier activation phrase?

I’m so glad you asked. 

Firstly, it’s a well-known example of translation in media. The ambiguity of its usage (since it’s supposed to be a random phrase) is part of what makes it interesting – I know I’ve seen many people make connections between the words and plot points or character elements (such as here) for almost as long as we’ve had this list – but ambiguity is the enemy of good translation. Someone had to choose which meanings to emphasize and which to minimize or dispense with entirely, and examining the implications of those choices can still lead to some great takeaway lessons for writing which doesn’t involve any translated or bilingual elements. It makes for a really nice, encapsulated laboratory to look at the effect of connotations and why it’s so important to choose our words carefully. 

Secondly, according to an interview with the writers (quoted here), the words themselves were chosen to be enigmatic – evocative but not necessarily significant – something that leaves them open to a much wider range of interpretations that can potentially be used to enhance narratives involving (and analyses of) the character of Sergeant James Bucky Barnes.

Thirdly, it’s short. With only 10 words, we can talk about each one in depth and not take all year to do it. 

Finally, this is the internet, where fandom reigns. Let’s just have fun with it.

I have decided to divide this up into multiple posts. As mentioned above, there are 10 words in the phrase: longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming, one, freight car.

I’ve broken them up so that they fall into three categories:

1. Effectively Interchangeable Words: that is, words which don’t experience any significant changes to their meaning when translated from English to Russian and vice versa. On this list, that’s pretty much just the numbers (seventeen, nine, and one), so in this section I will also explain why easy, direct translatability is super rare, call out some pitfalls that you’re likely to experience when dealing with a language that you (as the writer) don’t speak, and give some tips for avoiding those pitfalls as much as humanly possible.
2. Acceptable Variations for Pragmatic Reasons: that is, words where the writer or translator made a distinctive choice that cannot be completely mirrored in the other language, but which doesn’t create or destroy any narrative potentials that depart significantly from what the other language has. In this section, we’ll look at rusted, daybreak, furnace, and freight car.
3. We Need to Talk About This: that is, words where the differences between the two terms offer very different metaphorical and emotional implications, to the point where I think a different word probably would have better captured the meaning in one or the other of the languages. Each of them is a unique case, so they will be treated in separate posts. They are: longing, benign, and homecoming.

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Alright. Let’s start with the easy - well, easier - stuff and blast the three (more or less) directly-translatable words from the Winter Soldier activation phrase out of the way. Following that, we’ll dive into some meta discussion about why good translation can be so difficult to pin down, and some tips for writing with a language that you don’t actually speak. 

Numbers: Seventeen/Семнадцать, Nine/Девять, and One/Один

Note that all of these number translations have the same logic behind them, so I’m not separating them out. Future entries in the series will give a separate subheading to each word as I reach it.

Each of these is a numeral. In most cases in the languages that I have knowledge of, the cardinal numbers, or the ones you use to count in the abstract, are identical to the numerals, or the base form of the number that you use for specifying quantities. I say it that way because the number 1 does sometimes present a unique case, and that’s true of Russian: Один is the word for one, but if you’re just counting, you’ll sometimes start with раз (which means something like “once”). 

In most cases, however, Один is the base form that you want, though you will have to inflect it for case and gender to match the noun if using it as a specifier. 

Needless to say, counting with The Count on Sesame Street would work a little bit differently in Russian than in English as a result, since it would need to emphasize to children the connection between different inflected forms of the word, while in English we get to just say “one” in all contexts.  For instance, bat is a feminine noun in Russian, so “one bat” would use the form одна.  

Since counting and quantities are major constants of human thinking independent of language, the basic pattern of just counting to ten (or one hundred or whatever other number) is going to be pretty consistently and directly translatable. (Aside from maybe the onset, as noted above with раз.) After that, numbers actually can get kind of complicated depending on the language in question.

Unlike English, Russian uses different forms of numbers when counting items or naming years. These different forms are part of the language’s case system, which inflects nouns. You can get a feel for what cases do by comparing the pronouns in English, which contain the last vestiges of our inflected noun system:

• I am going/Someone called me/It’s for me/That is my thing/ I think it’s mine
• You are going/Someone called you/It’s for you/That is your thing/I think it’s yours
• She is going/Someone called her/It’s for her/That is her thing/I think it’s hers
• He is going/Someone called him/It’s for him/That is his thing/I think it’s his
• We are going/Someone called us/It’s for us/That is our thing/I think it’s ours
• They are going/Someone called them/It’s for them/That is their thing/I think it’s theirs
• It is going/Someone called it/It’s for it/That is its thing/I think it’s its
  (this last one feels really awkward, but you get the idea)

In each of the rows, the bolded words functionally refer to the same person, group, or thing. Which pronoun gets used is based on whether the referent is first/second/third person, singular/plural, and (in the third-person singular, at least) masculine/feminine/neuter, but from there, each pronoun shifts through a set of forms that communicate basic grammatical relationships between the elements of the sentence. These form shifts are referred to in linguistics as cases. 

Russian does this on steroids compared to English, because every noun in every sentence must be marked for number (as in singular vs plural, not 1-2-3), gender, and case, just like our pronouns are, and their corresponding adjectives must also match in form. This is why, for instance, if you want to make the numbers carry specific significance in a fanfic, my best advice to you is to find a Russian and ask them if the word would need to be inflected (and how), because chances are, it will.

Because these are just plain numerals in the English, however, whoever translated these words got to sidestep any deeper considerations about inflected forms and just use the regular, neutral, “counting” forms. (Note that in Russian, these "neutral" forms are considered masculine gender, and plural except in the case of one.)

Direct Translation Is Incredibly Rare

As I’m sure you can see from just this surface-level overview of the differences between Russian and English numbers - a facet of language that we typically think of as pretty basic - there aren’t a whole lot of things that can be simply plugged into Google Translate (or whatever you prefer) and come away with something that’s going to be fully functional in your writing. 

Even with categories that are more or less universal, you are still going to run into issues where pinning down an accurate translation may require information that isn’t necessarily obvious or available in the source language text, and a machine will always choose something to default to in those cases, which may or may not be accurate for your purposes. 

Kinship

Terms for mother and father are pretty universally translatable; every human being alive in every culture on earth had a biological mother and a biological father regardless of whether they knew or were raised by those individuals, so the terms for those relationships are probably as close as we get to truly universally-translatable words. But after that, it gets hairy:

• Terms for brothers and sisters seem like they should be directly translatable, but some languages will use different words depending on if your sibling is older or younger than you. 
• Terms for extended family members are much less reliable; some languages use different forms depending on whether your grandparents/uncles/aunts are related through your mother or your father. 

To make it even more complicated, affectionate terms are a whole different story. Think of the differences between each of Mom/Mama/Mommy or Dad/Papa/Daddy in English. These open up an entire world of semantic nuance that you cannot get from a dictionary or most online translation resources unless you start studying the language properly.

A great example of how this can really change the mood and character dynamics in a conversation comes from one of the scenes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. When Sam refers to his Titi, we see a fantastic example of someone using an affectionate term that doesn’t translate clearly to people who don’t share his linguistic and cultural background. You would never encounter that term in a machine translation or online dictionary; whoever wrote that dialogue knows that term from experience, I guarantee it, and it brings a level of realistic nuance to Sam’s character that would otherwise be lacking.  

With a dictionary, maybe you could get to auntie, but that word is clearly too impersonal and maybe even too trite for the relationship he’s describing. Meanwhile, his familiar affectionate term is too specific for Bucky and Zemo to connect with in the same way.

Having Sam lead with a more generic term would have given a very different tone to the whole conversation and missed a great opportunity to give us a more personal sense of the culture that Sam comes from. Translating this scene into any other language well will, as a necessity, involve finding equivalently specific and niche affectionate terms to use.

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Rusted/Ржавый

This is an example of a pragmatic choice made because of differences in underlying grammar structures between the two languages.

The English word rusted is a past participle form (describing an action that is completed prior to the moment of the statement). The Russian word Ржавый is an adjective form that my dictionary translates as “rusty”.

Sometimes the past participle is used interchangeably with the adjective form in English (mainly because sometimes they look the same). We can still feel the subtle difference between a past participle and an adjective in English, however. Try comparing the following sentences:  

• “I notice that my car has rusted/I noticed that my car had rusted”  
• “My car is rusty/My car was rusty”

The past participle describes the result of an action that was completed prior to the moment of the main action in a sentence (in this case, the rusting happened before the noticing), while the adjective describes a state of being, something that just is. The nuance in this case is pretty small. This one really does come down to personal preference when writing a scene, whether you use one or the other. Sometimes that will not be the case, but that’s outside the scope of what I want to address here.

Russian has a much more complex participle system than English does, which notoriously confuses and frustrates people learning it as a second language. It’s super fascinating, but the reasons why you would want to use one form or another are not always clear-cut to L2 learners, and using the wrong one can often result in significant variation from the intended meaning, which can in turn be discouraging.

Given the almost negligible difference between rusted and rusty in English, I’m not even remotely surprised that a translator would have spared themselves the headache of trying to figure out which participle form in Russian would be best to choose and just opted for the adjective form instead. This type of thing happens all the time with translations, and it’s a pretty sound strategy.

At the end of the day, the bulk of the meaning is carried by the root “rust” anyway. Whether it’s there as the result of a process or just the state of existence of something that we’ve happened upon, the associations of rust to concepts like age, breakdown, corrosion, degradation, and decay remain unaffected. It’s these concepts which make the word an intriguing and evocative choice as part of the phrase used to force Bucky to shift into the Winter Soldier.

In addition: technically, rust only happens to ferrous metals – that is, iron and its alloys. Other metals can tarnish or corrode (in similar oxidative processes), but the reddish brown color so reminiscent of dried blood that identifies rust specifically is a result of the iron oxide that is created through the process – since, incidentally, oxidation of iron (in the form of hemoglobin) is precisely why human blood is red. 

Following from this, consider how the activation phrase might have felt different, both to us as the audience and to Bucky as the character it was programmed into, had one of those other words (tarnish, corrosion, even degradation) been chosen. They’re much less vividly visual, and they evoke fewer associations because of that. 

Consider also how the word would carry significant weight while he was hauling around his original metal arm (a threat, perhaps, about what could happen to him should Hydra cease doing regular maintenance or decide to remove it?) and how that weight would change once he gets his new vibranium arm, since it pretty much doesn’t have any weaknesses (at least not ones of the structural integrity variety). 

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Daybreak/Рассвет

This one is an example of a pragmatic choice made because the target language (Russian) doesn’t seem to offer as many synonyms as the source language (English) does for the concept.

Note that “daybreak” is kind of a poetic word in English. We don’t often use it in our daily lives, typically preferring “sunrise” or “dawn” instead.

No really. Think about it. When was the last time that you, or someone you knew, said they were up at daybreak? I don’t know anyone who ever has, personally. I myself often say I was up at the crack of dawn to refer to getting up extra early for work or something, and I’ve known a fair number of people who have talked about being up at sunrise to describe having been up all night, but daybreak is one of those words that is encountered primarily through literature.

To me, the difference in the words is how they feel – that is, their connotation, which is their meaning beyond their literal dictionary definition. Your mileage may vary, but my perception of the connotations for each English word is as follows:

• Sunrise is a time and environmental descriptor. I think of the sky turning rosy pink and the entire drawn out period of night turning into day. I would use this word in a scene that focused on things beginning to relax or ease. (“Sunrise found them still talking out on the balcony, their argument forgotten.”)
• Dawn is a time and aspect descriptor. I think of roosters crowing and birds chirping and the world waking up. I would use this word in a scene that focused on activities beginning or increasing after a period of rest or separation. (“Meet at dawn and bring the map.”)
• Daybreak is a precise instant. I think of the first light of the sun coming over the horizon while the rest of the sky is still dark, and it fixes my mind’s eye on that glow of light to the exclusion of everything else. I would use this word in a scene that focused on a moment of revelation, breaking through, or overcoming an obstacle. (“By daybreak, he knew what he had to do.”)

Unlike English, Russian does not (to my knowledge) have separate words for these separate nuances. They’re rolled into Рассвет, which etymologically is derived from the words for “first light” (раз – see the discussion of numbers, and свет - light). I should note that my dictionary does also give an option of восход солнца for sunrise, which it directly contrasts with восход луны for moonrise, and which seems to refer more to the apparent movement of the sun or moon, rather than the time of day to which the English words refer. (If this is incorrect, I would appreciate if a Russian speaker could please let me know how this would be differentiated correctly.)

Since the subtitles use the very specific and slightly unusual daybreak, rather than the more generic/common sunrise or dawn, this could be interpreted or used to invoke the sharp transition Bucky undergoes into the persona of the Winter Soldier, or evocatively used to resonate with the small glimmers of himself that he retained despite the programming (as seen in Captain America: The Winter Soldier). It could also be used to evoke hope and a new perspective on life once he no longer has to fear that he will lose control again, depending on the angle that best fits with the moment in question.

I love that in this gif from the scene, there appears to be a lighter area on the horizon in the background when Ayo and Bucky finish the painful work of deprogramming him. 

Actual daybreak or metaphorical daybreak? You decide. 

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Furnace/Печь

This is another example of a pragmatic choice made because the target language (Russian) doesn’t offer as many synonyms as the source language (English) does for the concept.

In Russian, the word Печь can be used to refer to all manner of devices which create heat: ovens (primarily commercial ones, like in bakeries), stoves (of the pot-bellied, heat-your-home variety, not the cooking variety), heaters, and, yes, furnaces. It can also refer to a kiln, where clay is fired into pottery and then fired again after the application of glazes.

A furnace is something very industrial and utilitarian, at least in my dialect of English. We don’t talk about them much at all outside of the energy industry. (I think it’s probably a bit more common in the UK than in the US at large, and I think some areas of the US may use the term more frequently to describe what people in my area just call their hot water heater, but don’t quote me on that. Language is a weird, wild, wonderful thing, and any generalizations about it can pretty much always be immediately countered.)

Much like with daybreak, the choice to use this specific English word feels intentional for its evocative potential. After all, as the Winter Soldier, Bucky wasn’t treated like a person, he was treated like some kind of cross between a murderous pet and a sentient machine gun. The settings that we see him in prior to his escape and deprogramming are highly industrial spaces, places where one might reasonably expect to find an old, defunct furnace behind a rusty door.

One could construct a fairly solid metaphor of his captivity as a psychological furnace, burning away what remains of Bucky until only the Winter Soldier is left. The tension between the heat of fire and rage with the coldness implied by his moniker and the location in Siberia could be used to invoke some very powerful imagery and emotions of being caught between a rock and a hard place, between fire and ice, damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

Contrast oven or stove, which bring to mind kitchens and all of their connotations of food, warmth, comfort, and (sometimes) home, which itself lends a certain familiarity and emotional softness. Neither of those words would feel appropriate for anything associated with Bucky's canonical existence at any point after the 1940s.

Also contrast heater: again, the English word brings a connection to homes and offices and the regular rhythms of daily life that connotes the creation of comfortable (or at least not intolerable) warmth.

Kiln would have offered some interesting potentials, if we’re looking for metaphorical resonance. Consider that each time Bucky gets hauled out of his cryogenic chamber and reprogrammed, it’s not dissimilar to a process of repeatedly firing pottery. Hydra literally crafted him into a weapon with each and every round he endured. Note the dissimilarity, though, in that kilns are used for artistic and practical creative purposes, where the process that Bucky undergoes is purely destructive, both to himself and others. 

Certainly, nothing is being burned away to cinders and smoke in an oven, a stove, a heater, or a kiln - at least, not that we’re focusing on. So when we conjure up all of the associations to those words, most if not all associations to fuel are missing. With a furnace, on the other hand, the fuel is part of the implicit associations; the sole purpose of a furnace is to burn hot enough to heat something else – often well beyond temperatures that are safe for humans to have direct physical contact with - by completely incinerating the material used as fuel.

A Note on Daybreak and Furnace

In each of these two cases, it could be argued that the Russian words blunt some of the emotional weight and poetic resonance with the character that the English words have. The specificity of the English associations gets blurred by virtue of the fact that there are other associations rolled in under the umbrella term, but they don’t substantially alter whatever takeaway impression an audience member will obtain. Conversely, it could be argued that the Russian words offer a richer playground by virtue of offering even more connotations than the English words do. Indeed, all of the most important connotations are preserved, so the additional ones simply offer additional room to explore how these words impact and resonate with the character’s experiences.

How you choose to see it is up to you. My point with these words is less that one version is better than the other, than that the nuances conveyed by each of the terms offer interesting avenues with significant overlap for potential exploration, and that some of the most interesting possibilities are found in their differences. 

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Freight car/Грузовой вагон

This one is an example of a pragmatic choice made because the target language (Russian) offers more synonyms than the source language (English) does for the concept.

Context for this discovery: when I was pulling up the master list of the words, I noticed that a slightly different list is given here. They substitute Товарный вагон. I’m not sure where they got this from, so if anyone knows, I’d be curious about that. If it weren’t for that alternation, this would have seemed like a pretty straightforward translation choice to me (because again, I do not speak Russian natively, so I wouldn’t have been aware of any alternative).

So what’s the difference between Грузовой and Товарный? It’s subtle, but as far as I can tell: the first one seems to be an adjective that pertains to any type of cargo while the second seems to be an adjective that pertains to commodities – that is, things which are explicitly valued for their marketable potential. (вагон means the same thing in both cases: a train car.)

In English, both general cargo (example: supplies going from a storage facility to an outpost where they will be used) and commodity cargo (example: food being transported from farms to markets where it will be sold) are still cargo, which is reinforced by the term freight itself being an umbrella term that applies to the transportation of unspecified ~stuff~. It’s etymologically related to fraught, and therefore carries a connotation of being loaded, weighted, or heavy.

If the wiki is correct that Товарный вагон has been used in the MCU, it would be interesting to consider the reasons why that more-specific word could have been used in the translation. (To be clear: I went back and watched all of the sequences of the activation phrased being used, and I didn’t hear it. But I’m leaving the possibility open because it opens the door to choices between narratively compelling metaphors.)

It’s been well-discussed since the first time the activation phrase was introduced that freight car is the one term with an obvious connection to Bucky’s history: he fell from a train (specifically one carrying unidentified supplies) and that’s how he ended up in Hydra’s clutches in the first place. Without that, there is no Winter Soldier. So consider the deeper implications of what it would metaphorically mean if the term used emphasized the train car as carrying cargo rather than commodities (or vice versa).

Which better fits with their view of him?

Dehumanization is the name of the game with Hydra, and it is clearly and repeatedly shown that they don’t value Bucky as a person but rather a tool. Both cargo and commodities are implied to have value, but in very different ways. Cargo is inherently valuable for its utility; commodities derive their value from how much other people want to obtain them. 

A case can definitely be made that both metaphors apply. Bucky’s skills may be valuable in certain contexts in and of themselves, but let’s be real: at least some part of his value to Hydra was always as potential leverage against Steve.

Chapter Text

This is where we start to get into the fun stuff: the things that I honestly really hope people in the fandom see. 

If the questions at the end of this post give you any ideas or sparks of inspiration, please reblog (and maybe tag a friend?) to help others see it. Please also link back to this post in anything you write based on those ideas. Thank you so much!

Welcome to the first of the Big Three. 

Three words from the Winter Soldier activation phrase with significant variations in their English and Russian meanings, that is. I’ll start by examining the English meaning, implications, and connotations of the word Longing. I will then move on to exploring the English meaning, implications, and connotations of the English words that are offered  by multiple sources as acceptable translations for the Russian word which is subtitled as Longing in the activation phrase. 

Along the way, we’ll talk about why Longing doesn’t fit with those other possibilities, and what it might say about/mean for Bucky to have either one of them be the concept that Hydra used to program him. We’ll end with some questions arising out of the tension between the two different words and their respective meanings, about what this might mean for the character at various points in the narrative, including post-deprogramming.

Brace yourselves. Let’s dive in. 

Longing/ Желание

The word longing in English carries some heavy emotional content. We don’t talk about longing for pizza when we have a craving, for instance, or longing for a new pair of shoes or a fancy car.

Like, okay, maybe if something is really special, but it would say a lot about a character if they described a drive toward something as longing for it rather than wanting, needing, wishing for, aspiring to, or desiring it.

Longing for a person or even a place or situation is much more typical, and even then, it isn’t that simple.

• I’m longing to see you immediately brings to mind the sensation of being far away from someone for a very long time, and very probably not having any effective way to change the situation.
• I’m longing for home similarly invokes a deep-seated sense of being far away, for a long time, not having the ability to get back, and experiencing deeply melancholy feelings about it.
• Longing for human touch conjures up an incredibly lonely and isolated person, in a very compact statement that can be elaborated on or left to breathe as a piece requires.
• Longing to see [someone] just one more time carries implications of loss, grief, and mourning.

The simple fact is that a certain wistful sadness is baked into the word. It’s a deeply emotional  expression, that a native English speaker would only use about something that they feel in their soul. In part, that’s why the word was invented. It comes from the Old English langian, meaning “to yearn after, to grieve for”. It’s also related to the Old English lang, from which we get the adjective “long” that describes something with a considerable distance from one end to the other. 

It makes sense on an intuitive level, right? Something that is far away and that would take a long time and a lot of effort to get to, whether literally or figuratively (assuming that it’s even possible to get there at all), is going to be something that you’re either going to give up on pretty quickly, or find yourself completely fixated on.

And due to that, longing carries with it almost a connotation of impossibility, something that cannot be fulfilled – certainly not now, maybe not ever.

It is not simple wanting.

Now, as I’ve said repeatedly, I’m not Russian, so take this with an entire block of salt: if I had to translate this word into Russian for the activation phrase, I probably would have chosen Тоска. 

• Some perspectives on this word can be found here. 
• It’s often described as a uniquely Russian sentiment, but so much the better, right? Why wouldn’t the Hydra scientists use a highly-specific cultural term as part of the programming, if only because it would make it that much harder for anyone else to randomly guess.
• It’s also the word that my Russian-English dictionary uses for Longing. 
• My etymological dictionary of Russian goes further and elaborates on  Тоска as “melancholy; from [root word] originally assumed to mean ‘emptiness’ (the precursor of melancholy) and cognate with [word from another Slavic language] meaning ‘emaciated’ (originally ‘empty’)”. 
• My frequency dictionary identifies Тоска as the 2,741st most commonly encountered word in Russian. I don’t know about you, but I’d expect something as specific as Longing to be fairly rare in its usage, since it conjures up such a specific set of associations. Another point where it works.
• Finally, my manual of Russian roots, prefixes, and suffixes identifies the root of  Тоска as Тоск, which it identifies as “yearning”; this matches the etymology of Longing coming from another root meaning “yearning” (though the manual does note that there is no directly equivalent term in English). In its example sentences for Тоска, it also uses the words for “pining” and “homesickness”, which, again, are words that fit with the English sense of Longing pretty well, and would highly resonate with poor Bucky’s suffering.
• I certainly don’t see anything in any of these resources that would make it a poor fit, especially not when the phrase is supposedly meant to be a bunch of random words anyway. (Random isn’t actually all that random in language due to an effect called priming; I’m actually going to add an extra article at the end of this series addressing that and a few other points that didn’t fit well in the rest of these articles to conclude, so stay tuned.)

Instead, the word used is Желание. Looking this word up across multiple references:

• My dictionary has “+genitive/+infinitive: to desire for/to desire to do”
• My etymological dictionary doesn’t have it, I presume because it’s a fairly straightforward word without a complex origin
• My frequency dictionary identifies  Желание as the 527th most commonly encountered word in Russian, and defines it as “desire, wish” - much more common sentiments in English, as well
• My manual of roots, prefixes and suffixes identifies the root as Жел, meaning “desire/wish”
• And, just for the sake of curiosity, plugging it back into the glorified dictionary that is Google Translate, the entries that I get for Желание are desire, wish, will, want, aspiration.

Now, I don’t know about you, but in English none of these words comes anywhere close to the emotional punch that Longing packs. At least, not in the same way.

To be fair, the script was written in English, most likely with a note to the effect of “Russian, subtitled” and then a list of the intended English words. But for the sake of argument and illustration, let’s pretend that the screenwriters actually speak Russian and took the time to choose out the exact shades of meaning that they wanted the activation phrase to have in that language. After all, precision of meaning is always going to enhance your storytelling, and it’s a useful thought experiment, especially since within the Marvel universe, the audience is given to understand that Bucky was programmed (in whole or in part) by Russian speakers who would have known full-well the implications of the words that they were choosing.

We’ll start with breaking the possible English words down for their implications. As we go, pretend that we’re deciding which one to choose as a translation from a hypothetical Russian word that carries all the same connotations as Longing does in English. In the process, we’ll compare and contrast and see why the existing pair doesn’t really work all that well if a cohesive meaning is the goal (as it should be in good translation). 

Finally, we’ll examine the impact of the tension between the two words based on what we know of the character and raise some questions about the implications of this tension even at this point in the MCU’s narrative, where Bucky is no longer subject to activation as the Winter Soldier. 

Desire

In English, this word’s sensual, intense, and physical. It carries a heat and an oomph that feels out of place in the majority of contexts. There’s a sense of drive to it, of being compelled to at least try to obtain whatever the focus is. If longing is felt in the heart and the soul, desire is felt in the body, specifically in the belly or the gut. We mainly use this word to talk about romance and sex, both in terms of potential partners and specific activities. In other aspects of life, I think most people would probably choose to use the words craving or urge instead, or to use various linguistic distancing tactics to reduce the visceral intensity of this word.

For instance, I desire you is one hell of a come on. It’s almost confrontational in its directness, but it’s also unmistakable in its meaning. If someone asks, What are your desires? most English speakers are going to think first of the type of partners or activities or fantasies they enjoy, even if they decide not to talk about any of those things and choose instead to dwell on tamer dreams for the future. 

I have a desire for [something] grants a small level of distance that ramps down the carnal intensity and makes the word more flexible for a wider range of situations. The difference between He desires her and He has a desire for her is subtle but still there. The first again feels uncomfortably direct and possibly like something might imminently happen between the two, while the second describes more a statement of relevant context. Then try substituting any noun, say a food item: He desires food vs He has a desire for food. The first has an urgency to it, while the second conveys an intense want for something without automatically feeling like we’re about to cross over into some awkward territory with a ravenous travel buddy. We still wouldn’t use this word often in this way, but it has a bit more of a range of uses than the first. 

I have a desire to [do something] exists on that same, slightly-reduced level of intensity. We can still perceive that it’s a passionate statement: She desires to kiss him vs She has a desire to kiss him vs She wants to kiss him each take a step down the ladder of intensity (and related awkwardness). The first both sounds weird despite being grammatically correct (because people don’t typically speak that directly) and feels confrontational. The second sounds much more familiar, and indicates a pretty intense focus. The third is like “Yeah, she wants to kiss him, but she also want to watch TV or take a nap.” We would never follow a phrase involving desire with “but” or “or” in the same way. It simply doesn’t offer that kind of ambivalence about its object.  

Longing isn’t ambivalent either, but it’s also not driven, physical, or exciting. It’s passive, emotional, and depressing. It exists on a polar opposite plane to most of what desire implies.

Wish

In English, this word is wistful, but not necessarily sad. It can be used for a range of situations and emotions indicating either a mild wanting for something or the wanting for something that can’t happen but that one is more or less at peace about. This is felt in the thoughts and the intellect, primarily. There’s not so much a drive as a sense of casual interest/investment, a sense that “if things work out” it would be nice, but one isn’t really going to put much stock into them doing so.

I wish I knew that sooner inherently implies that something would have been different if that had been the case. It relates what did happen to what was not known at the time, and posits a universe in which the information had been different and therefore the ensuing actions and subsequent results would have been different, too.

I wish I had [something] again invokes the difference that possession of something would create. I wish I had a million dollars, for instance, or I wish I had a nicer car. The whole point of wishing is envisioning a universe in which circumstances are different in a way that is assumed to be better for the speaker, but it doesn’t automatically invoke the sense that the person is struggling because that improved reality doesn’t exist.  

I wish they would stop doing that – a familiar thought when someone is being annoying, again, doesn’t actually expect the cessation of the irritating activities. Certainly, the person thinking it usually sees some compelling reason not to ask the other person to stop doing that (such as them being a stranger) or actually has made the request and been denied. There may be some anger implied in the latter case, but it’s not necessarily something that the person is getting caught up in over the long-term.

I wish [someone] were here right now is a much dialed-down expression of missing someone than longing for their presence. It’s definitely something that people say when they know it isn’t possible for any of a million reasons (they’re currently busy; they’re traveling; you just had a fight; etc.) but doesn’t automatically entail feeling any loss about it. Compare Wish you were here! postcards, which are meant to convey that you’re thinking of someone and it would be nice if they could also enjoy whatever location you’re in, but sending one doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re feeling any significant emotions about their absence. There’s a reason why we don’t make Longing for you to be here! postcards. 

I wish I could go is a fairly polite way of expressing regret when unable to accept an invitation due to a scheduling conflict. Something else is presenting an obstacle, and so the word is used to convey the emotional draw of wanting to go, but being unable to for reasons that the speaker is unable to change (note that it lacks inherent negativity, though that can be implied by tone. For instance, someone could wish I could go to your special event, but I’m gonna be out of town on a fabulous vacation; sorry, not sorry).

All of these are oriented toward something that didn’t or doesn’t exist in the moment of the statement, which does compare somewhat with Longing, except that none of these are particularly fraught emotionally. There may be some frustration or mild sadness, but certainly nothing that comes anywhere near the grief of Longing. Indeed, the most significant aspect of these statements is their conditionality: it’s a wish because it’s not possible; if it was - or becomes - possible, the implication is that some action would or will result.

For further consideration: making a wish and blowing out birthday candles is a ritual we do every year, yet how many of us think of anything we seriously want in that moment? I can’t speak for you, but for me it’s nearly always a frivolous thing. Same with any other wish-related practices, like tossing pennies into fountains or wishing on a star. Indeed, these are all things we teach children to do, and which adults largely don’t put much stock in. Similarly, the three wishes of fairytales are always these grand, impossible, life-altering things, but they’re things that we all know can’t happen. That’s literally the whole point. Nobody wishing on a star or birthday cake or fountain actually expects any result to materialize, and more importantly, they’re not bothered by that fact.

Between the “if it was possible it would be happening” implication and the association with childishness, using this word wouldn’t be nearly as evocative as any of the other words on the list. So it’s safe to say that this is the least fitting interpretation to use for our hypothetical.

Will

In English, this word conveys a type of certainty – not necessarily in the outcome, but in the efforts that a person is willing to go to in order to achieve their ends. It’s driven, in a rubber-meets-the-road kind of way; the existence of obstacles or barriers is implicit, and so is the drive to overcome them anyway.  This is a very cerebral term; it conveys that someone has fixated on something and become entirely focused on achieving their aims.

We talk about someone having a will of steel when they don’t back down, or being willful when they’re stubborn and difficult to persuade. The will of a king is considered to have the force of law in our historical and fantasy literature; a person’s last will and testament is their final say on what happens to everything that they’ve accumulated in their lifetime (and is very difficult to dispute in court because we have cultural values about respecting a person’s wishes even once they’ve passed away - which demonstrates the connection between those two concepts). 

It was against my will points to the element of choice inherent in this word. Someone who has done something in spite of their actual thoughts, feelings, and desires reaches for this word to explain and to justify. It’s often used interchangeably or in proximity with I had no choice, reinforcing that connection.

Note that it’s not the same as the modal verb “will” which indicates future action, as in I will do this thing, but there is definitely a connection between the two. Who says that they will do something who isn’t choosing to and thereby effectively binding themselves to succeed or risk being seen as a liar?

He willed it into existence or She accomplished it by sheer force of will both further demonstrate the equation of the will with one’s determination and autonomy; in English, a person’s will is the extension of their agency and power in the world, even to the point of sometimes accomplishing things that seemed to be impossible to others. It is the opposite of the helplessness that comes with Longing, and a long way away from the conditionality of wishing. Really, there almost couldn’t be less of a connection while still being related. Will doesn’t entertain the concept of impossibility or obstacles that are too great. Will also doesn’t get bogged down in feeling sad while there’s work to be done.

Aspiration

In English, this word carries a kind of powerful hope and signifies something almost like a quest. It’s about seeing some goal as a pinnacle to be reached, and striving to get there. It’s driven, but not solely mental or visceral; there’s a sense of depth to it, a resonance with one’s values and deeper self. Arguably a combination of a wish and a desire, this is felt in the mind and in the heart. Even if the goal is never attained, the value of the aspiration is often in the inspiration it provides to grow and learn.

Professional aspirations are things that we talk about in the context of a career rather than merely a job, particularly one that a person is passionate about, perhaps medicine or law or teaching. It’s usually something that the person who holds the aspirations sees as being an enormous accomplishment, and often a step on the road to doing something of significance in society. I aspire to be a doctor is the type of thing that a really driven student might say. Or I aspire to go to Juilliard from a particularly dedicated actor or musician.

Personal aspirations as well often reflect some sort of deeper values, such as when someone aspires to be like a role model or mentor who was particularly influential in their lives.

The etymology of this word reflects the growth-oriented aspects of it: it’s composed of elements meaning “to breathe toward”, which conjures up the associations this word has with working toward something constantly. Breath by breath, day by day, year after year, the aspirant works and grows and reaches toward their goal. 

Compared to Longing, there is a small overlap in the connotations that the goal is a long way off and something deeply valued. But where Longing is oriented to feel grief over the distance and time required to get there, aspiration finds in it a source of hope and inspiration. Of course it will take a long time to get there: the person who holds the aspiration knows – as part of aspiring in the first place – that they’re not ready yet, and that they’re just starting out on a journey. The attitudes encapsulated in the two words are diametrically opposed.

Wanting

In English, this is arguably our largest umbrella term for all of the terms that have come before, because it encompasses aspects of each of them, but at a more casual level. If there were a Venn diagram of these words, this is the central circle that overlaps with all of the others. It’s a very middle-of-the-road kind of word, expressing an interest in having or obtaining something, but not necessarily indicating anything about the intensity of the feeling or the resulting level of follow-through.

Any situation that any of the preceding words could be used in, want can usually be substituted easily.

In the passionate and visceral contexts bounded by desire, I want you is still a suitable alternative that conveys a direct level of interest and attraction. It may not be as deep or as passionate as desire, but it’s still pretty intense and exciting.

In the conditional and conceptual contexts bounded by wishing, I want a million dollars is a little more concrete and active, but still doesn’t necessarily entail that any action is about to be taken beyond noting the idea and moving on.

In the dedicated-and-determined contexts bounded by will, She accomplished it because she wanted to or He wanted it so badly he didn’t let anything stop him definitely indicate that want can still be a very powerful force when leveraged, though they don’t have the connotation of something that was going to drive a person to do whatever it takes. Similarly, I didn’t want to is much less resolute than something like It was against my will; not totally dissimilar, but definitely would feel more like an excuse than an explanation.

In the growth-over-time contexts bounded by aspiration, I want to be a doctor or I want to be like [some role model] reflect the emotional attraction toward the profession or activity, but not necessarily the follow-through required to get there. Lots of people want to be doctors at some point in their lives; by no means do most people experience it as a calling, nor do all of them go on to complete medical school and residency.

And just like the preceding words, want shares some overlap with Longing, in the idea that the thing that is out of reach is something that the person has an interest in or attraction to, but wanting maintains ambivalence about whether or not to take action, rather than effectively declaring action to be useless.  

Analysis

So, to distill down:

• Longing is about grief and loss.
• Desire is about passion and drive.
• Wish is about conditions and preferences.
• Will is about determination and persistence.
• Aspiration is about potential and growth.
• Wanting is about attraction and interest.

When taken together, Longing is a clear outlier.  All of the words listed on the dictionary gloss for Желание share at least several similarities; a person using any of those words to describe an object or a situation is clearly focusing on something that is within their realm of influence, even if only emotionally or only because of their ability to choose how to approach the circumstances surrounding that focus. Additionally, each of these words describes something that can – if the focus is ultimately acquired or attained – give the subject a sense of pleasure or satisfaction in the accomplishment. Longing is clearly a horse of a different color, and so would not be an accurate translation of our hypothetical Russian word with the same meanings that Longing actually holds in English; therefore the fact that Longing was translated into Желание creates an intriguing tension between their respective possible implications.

What Are the Different Implications for Bucky?

Narratively, the fact that the subtitled activation phrase was constructed with a description of wanting that inherently implies loss, grief, and impossibility evokes one set of emotions when we see it used against Bucky. He becomes a mournful figure, one that evokes sadness and pity, as the concept effectively mocks his enormous losses, holding them forever just out of reach. At the same time, the spoken activation phrase was constructed with a description that seems to imply something different: that of a compulsion to action and the very real potential to not only get results but also to feel satisfied, accomplished, and powerful because of those results. This evokes an entirely different set of emotions when we see it used against him. He becomes a much more conflicted figure, one that evokes discomfort and even danger, as the concept effectively signals a much deeper violation by Hydra: twisting his emotions to force him to be complicit in things he would never do under his own agency, and to paradoxically derive some sense of his value from that (at least while he’s in Winter Soldier mode). 

Longing reinforces his victimization. Желание reinforces his culpability. 

Neither is wrong. Both are extensively shown in the MCU canon to be things that Bucky himself feels the weight of.

(Someone nominate this man for all of the acting awards. All of them.) 

Stories live and die by the nuance that they contain, so having two words standing at such different points on the emotional spectrum means that they each lend themselves to drastically different interpretations of the Hydra scientists’ intentions, Bucky’s own sense of emotional responsibility for the deeds he did as the Winter Soldier, and the potential ramifications to Bucky’s psychology even after he is no longer actively functioning as the Soldier, due to the fact that he still has to work through the concepts that were messed with in order to try to return to some kind of baseline normal.

Both words offer enormous possibilities for interpreting the character, the Marvel universe, and everything in between, regardless of whether you’re a casual fan theorizing, a more active fan plotting a fic, or even a member of the production team actively collaborating on scenes and storylines involving this character. Juxtaposing them this way opens up a world of new possibilities that exclusively using either one alone leaves out of the picture – the problem is, it was clearly (1) unintentional by the creators and (2) overlooked by the audience. 

The subtitled version is what the vast majority of English speakers walked away with, the Russian being little more than a cool sound effect to people who don’t speak the language. The assumption in the English-speaking world is often that languages are somehow interchangeable and that subtitles will perfectly accurately reflect what’s being said, which doesn’t tend to inspire much drive to dig further into the choices that were made in search of additional nuance (sadly). Meanwhile, (and correct me if I’m wrong,) it’s my understanding that the films are dubbed into Russian for release in Russia, so very likely the majority of Russian speakers wouldn’t have had the same chance to see the subtitles and to ponder the differences from their own words. Even if they did get the same version of the film that we did, for them to catch the discrepancy requires that they would have had the exposure to the emotional specificity that the word longing carries in English, rather than also trusting that it was a correct translation in the first place. 

After all, if тоска is thought to be a uniquely Russian sentiment, maybe longing is a uniquely English sentiment in its own right. Is it possible that desires and wishes are a more universal concept, while the pain that comes with lack is ultimately something more specific based on what our respective cultures teach us is most important? 

How much can we truly understand each other’s emotional vocabulary if we don’t understand each other’s emotional landscapes?

How Does This Impact Post-Deprogramming Narratives Involving Bucky?

I’m not super involved in the fandom so I don’t have any strong feelings or investment one way or the other about any of Bucky’s various potential relationships (y'all have fun), but one need look no further than considering the impact of his Winter Soldier programming to his relationships as a category at large to see what I’m getting at. Much has been made of “longing” and the loss of his home and his friends/family (and Steve in particular), the yearning to return during his captivity and the impossibility of that, in addition to the general tragedy of his circumstances. But what about Желание, and the twisting of his desires and motivations to Hydra’s purposes, especially where his home and his friends/family (and Steve in particular) are concerned, the drive to seek them out during his captivity deliberately preserved - not to reclaim them, but purely to be used as raw materials and channeled into a drive to destroy the things they focus on?  

What would that do to a man? 

What would that in turn imply for recovered Bucky’s psychology as he’s working through these concepts, having to learn that it’s okay to want things and that it’s important and good for him to be driven to pursue his goals and form new relationships – not just because they’re actually possible or because he no longer has to worry that they won’t just get yanked away from him again, but specifically because they are possible and he’s spent so long being afraid of his destructive potential and the deep roots of this programming that he’s been limiting himself as a type of protective coping mechanism?

Similarly, what does this word pair mean for the rest of the list? 

It comes first before anything else, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility to consider that there may be some significance there, in-universe. Are some of these words meant to create affinities or revulsions, to push him toward certain concepts/associations and away from others? Did Hydra land on these concepts by identifying a resonance they wanted to create in Bucky and use that to weaponize his own mind against him? Or are they words describing things that were already significant to him, points of emotional leverage that they could corrupt as they built their scaffolding into his mind and soul?

How would each of these possibilities reinforce or weaken various aspects of his core personality from before they got to him? His values? His self-image? His plans, dreams, hopes, and desires? His relationships?

What would they have had to do to strip him away from himself so completely that he becomes the Winter Soldier that we see in the films? How else do these  words reflect that process? How does that, in turn, mirror what his healing process will have to be (because that has only just begun)?

I, personally, am less interested in finding the answers than in asking the questions. However, I know that there are a lot of people who will be very interested in exploring the possible answers. There’s a lot to consider, and the narrative implications of this word pair are practically endless. It’s a real shame that the vast majority of viewers only ever got the English half of it because the duality was unintentional. 

So go forth, armed with a more complete picture, and bring some fresh complexity to this fandom. 

Chapter Text

Welcome back for the second of the big three words where the translations cause meaning shifts. This time we’re delving into Benign, starting with a continuity error in Captain America: Civil War. Because of that, this post is going to work a little bit differently than the others, and we’re going to begin with revisiting the two clips in the movie where we see the Winter Soldier activation phrase used.

Note that the word for Benign is different in each clip.

If you need to, go back and listen again. That second clip has a lot of ambient noise because of the chaos of the scene, so it’s possible that at first it’ll sound to you like Daniel Bruhl is just pronouncing the same word differently - it did to me at first, to be totally honest. That’s because both words start with the same prefix (meaning “good”); the change in meaning comes from the stem.

If you need a hint: you’re listening for something that could be loosely transliterated as dobro-serdechniy in the first clip in Siberia, and something that could be loosely transliterated as dobro-kachestvenniy in the second clip with Zemo.

Got it now?

Awesome. Grab a friend (or maybe two) and let’s roll.

Let’s start by talking about the associations that Benign has in English, as we’ve done with the last few words. From there, we’ll go into the difference between the two Russian words that got used and talk a bit about why I think this could actually open up a really interesting avenue for creative exploration, and also why I 100% do not expect the canonical MCU to do so (and then also-also why I still want the people involved in creating it to comment anyway). 

Benign

Benign is kind of an amusing word to me because it feels almost… passive. It is the blandest of positive words, to the point where I can’t think of anything that feels less substantive and yet is still considered a good thing. 

It’s just kind of generically pleasant. Describing a person as benign doesn’t actually offer much about who they are at their core: it tells me nothing of their personality, nothing of their values, just that they’re sort of blandly polite and not given to malice. It asserts positive traits by indicating an absence of negative qualities, but that can fall anywhere along the spectrum from just past neutral all the way up to an honest-to-God saint.

That said, we don’t often use this word for people. Maybe in a phrase like He was a benign ruler, but again, that mainly serves to contrast with the image a lot of us have of despotic rulers in history by implying that ‘true, all those other guys were jerks, but at least this one wasn’t awful (and maybe he actually even tried to be helpful)’. 

More likely, we’ll use it to talk about things people do: giving benign smiles or showing benign interest, both of which can be used to indicate encouragement without pushiness, or other efforts at friendliness. It’s not a word we typically use in real life; in fiction, it mostly applies to interactions between characters who don’t know each other well and can’t evaluate one another’s intentions beyond a generic sense of good or bad just yet, which also helps to signal to the reader how they should interpret the character engaging in those actions, regardless of whether that initial impression is ultimately played straight or inverted. 

Most commonly, though, we use this word to talk about things like They found a tumor, but testing showed that it was benign – again, indicating something that could have been strongly negative or dangerous and instead just turns out to kind of… just… exist.

The quality of goodness implied in this word comes from the Latin root bene, which means “good/well” in the sense of something that meets with approval. To me, the mood of the word just reads like a shrug and a casual “oh, [them/that]? Whatever; it’s fine, nothing to worry about,” which I suppose would count as a very faint form of hand-waved approval. It’s at least not an active disapproval.

It’s a very simple, very empty kind of good. I certainly don’t think anyone would feel particularly complimented to be described as benign, for instance; they probably wouldn’t be offended, either, but that neutrality is what’s interesting about it.

Добросердечный vs Доброкачественный

Both of these words are given in my Russian-English dictionary as possible translations for benign. So far so good; either would apparently have been a totally mainstream translation (unlike with longing). Doing a reverse-lookup, however, yields an interesting difference:

• Добросердечный is exclusively defined in my dictionary as “kind-hearted”
• Доброкачественный is defined as “of good quality, benign”

As I said in the introduction, Добро is a prefix meaning “good”. So let’s look more closely at the roots:

сердечный

• Looking this up in the dictionary turns up meanings of “related to the heart, cardiac, loving, deep-felt, warm-hearted, and cordial,” it can be used in compounds to talk about “heartache” or “heart attacks”
• Neither the etymological dictionary, the frequency dictionary, nor the manual of roots, prefixes, and suffixes had much to contribute for this one
• This is definitely a stronger word than benign is in English, but not so much so that it feels like an inaccurate translation, especially in light of situations like benign rulers, benign smiles, or benign interest above. It’s just not the most-preferred translation, as evidenced by the reverse-lookup, so the fact that it’s the one that gets used first when we’re being introduced to the concept of the activation phrase is an interesting point to consider. 

качественный

• Looking this up in the dictionary turns up meanings of “qualitative, high-quality”; some related words refer to high standards and examples
• Neither the etymological dictionary or the frequency dictionary had much to contribute for this one
• The manual of roots, prefixes, and suffixes had an intriguing entry in an index for a root that wasn’t fleshed out in the main text, that may indicate that the root of this word is related to honor or integrity, but I don’t know enough to make that leap for certain. 
• Like  Добросердечный, this is a stronger word than benign is in English, though in a very different direction (lining up more with the bene root of meeting with approval), and again not so much stronger that it feels like an inaccurate translation. 

Honestly, were it not for the continuity error, benign probably would have fallen into the same pragmatic translation category as rusted, daybreak, furnace, and freight car: the translations are both acceptable because Russian makes a distinction between various nuances that exist under the umbrella of what English has merged together in this one word. 

Let’s consider some more data, though. 

Deprogramming Bucky

The word that Ayo uses is Добросердечный, clearly indicating that this is the “official” word in the phrase. It matches the “calmer” scene in Siberia at the beginning of Civil War, as opposed to the more frenetic scene with Zemo. (Note also that unlike the other two, the Zemo scene has no subtitles; the clear emphasis is on Bucky’s reaction to the words, not the dialogue itself.) 

It’s really profound that once she gets to Добросердечный, the audio cues shift as Bucky begins to realize that the programming really isn’t going to take hold this time (in contrast to his bravado just a moment prior). He still flinches at it, and at the next word, but something in his expression begins to relax and he can finally lower his guard and grieve what he’s been through. 

There’s also a beautiful emotional resonance of Добросердечный being the word where Bucky realizes that his heart and his mind have finally been restored to him; that his kind-hearted nature is no longer corrupted by something that was done to him against his will. For that reason, I would have liked to see Kindhearted used as the subtitle the whole time (especially since it’s the main gloss for Добросердечный in the dictionary), but it’s not an issue that I feel the need to really dwell on.

Again, were it not for the continuity issue with Zemo, this would mostly have fallen under the same category as acceptable pragmatic compromises in translation, or maybe gotten its own category of “Technically Fine, However…”

What can I say? I have a lot of capital-O Opinions when it comes to good writing, storytelling, and translation.  

So They Made a Mistake. Why Does It Matter? 

Look, I don’t know about you, but if I was a super secret evil organization with an honest-to-God brainwashed super soldier on ice down in my basement, I’d want to make damn sure that the keys were incredibly specific and unlikely to ever be guessed, leaked, or otherwise potentially used against me. Having two words that would effectively work in the same place in the formula to activate said super soldier is arguably a vulnerability in the system that it makes no sense to leave unpatched unless there is some sort of highly-compelling reason to do otherwise. 

Like, for instance, if the discrepancy was deliberate. 

Go back to the scene with Ayo, and note what memories Bucky flashes back to while she recites the words. (You may have to refer to Disney+ for the whole scene; I could only find this partial fragment on YouTube.) Note that the only shot we get from the time that Zemo activated Bucky’s Winter Soldier programming is from when Bucky was still fighting to get out of containment in order to make Zemo stop. There are other memories from the Civil War movie, but we see no memories from the Zemo sequence after that point in the phrase, when Bucky would have been under the activation of the version using  Доброкачественный. That version is, as mentioned above, the version that inherently invokes the concept of being up to an exacting standard rather than one that invokes the natural, kindly state of his personal character before he was programmed. 

So, What if There Were TWO (or More) Ways to Activate the Winter Soldier?

At least one using Добросердечный and one using Доброкачественный, each geared to different types of missions?

What might that look like? 

I think the case could be made that we’ve seen a pretty clear difference in both of the fight sequences where Bucky goes up against other Avengers. 

In Captain America: Winter Soldier, he utilizes strategy as much as he utilizes brute force, and he also speaks on-screen. It may not be much, but he does give orders to the other Hydra agents on the bridge early on. He also responds to Steve, of course.

In Captain America: Civil War, he becomes a one-man wrecking machine, bludgeoning anything and everything he comes into contact with without any clear sign of a strategy or plan except to get off the premises as fast as he can. He remains completely non-verbal, even when Natasha tells him “You could at least recognize me,” something that should have provoked at least some kind of response based on his actions in the previous film. Instead, we see him with full-on blank eyes as he chokes her. (Couldn’t find a gif, short clip instead.)

It’d probably be a safe interpretation to assume that  Добросердечный activates the Winter Soldier Winter Soldier, one with the ability to anticipate the choices and actions of his targets and opponents in order to better counter them and fulfill his missions. This would be the Soldier that might be sent undercover, into places and situations where he’d have to be able to avoid drawing notice, and that would involve blending in as an actual human being. Allowing him to retain any of the people-sense that made Bucky Barnes such a charmer in the 40s would only be an asset to that goal. This spy-sassin version would also have to be able to form and recall at least short-term memories, as a consequence of being sent into places to collect information as often as to extract (or murder) individuals of interest. Most of the major sequences we’ve seen of the Winter Soldier, from his initial appearance to fighting Steve on the helicarrier, killing Howard and Maria Stark in flashback, and choosing to kill Yori Nakajima’s son in flashback, are arguably in the ‘personality’ activated by this code word. 

Conversely, it’s probably a safe interpretation to assume that  Доброкачественный activates the Civil War Winter Solder, one who possesses absolutely zero subtlety in exchange for maximum damage potential and an achieve-the-goal-or-die-trying single-mindedness. This would be the Soldier sent in anywhere a metaphorical sledgehammer is required, perhaps to help maintain order within Hydra by crushing any restive elements. Since very little thought or subtlety is required to accomplish such complete destruction and violence, the ability to form and recall significant memories would only be a hindrance, potentially creating distractions and definitely creating the risk of security vulnerabilities later on down the road. We’ve seen this version of the Soldier during the scene in Berlin, but also potentially in the scene where he’s ordered to protect one of his handlers from the other test subjects in the Winter Soldier program in Civil War. 

An Alternative Possibility

This one requires a shout-out to my friend Mark: after I shared the information that the code phrase uses two different words for Benign at different times, he suggested that perhaps there were various points when Bucky would have had to be re-programmed, and that the divergence could be explained in-universe as an artifact of an iterative process. 

It’s a compelling theory and one that deserves exploration as well. The book that contains the activation phrase is a decently-sized notebook; I have several journals of about that size that each took me several months to fill up, and that was just writing about writing ideas and things that were happening in my life. It would probably take substantially longer to fill up a notebook of that size if it was only being used for experimental notes and plans. Based on the relative places in the book used in each sequence (close-ups at approximately 1:29 in the first clip and 0:37 in the second one), it appears to me as though Zemo is reading from a point that is further into the text. Not significantly further, but definitely more of a central point than the near-to-the-cover point of the earlier scene. 

Given that the Siberia scene is set in 1991 and Bucky didn’t escape from Hydra until the time of Winter Soldier (ostensibly 2014, in conjunction with the year of its release) it’s definitely possible that there would have been time for a reprogramming to occur, and therefore for there to be a new code list further into the text. 

My creative concern arising from that then becomes, “how many other iterations are there, and how many of those might have still worked (or might even still be active)?” I also feel like the final iteration would necessarily fall toward the back of the book, so why was Zemo using one from a middle point, unless it was because the different iterations are specific to different constellations of skills and that was the skill set he required? 

Things to ponder as a baseline before diving in to the standard questions I’ve been raising throughout this series of “what would this mean for Bucky and his psychology?” etc. 

Either Way, the MCU (Probably) Isn’t Going to Go There

Maybe if someone had noticed the linguistic continuity error before The Falcon and the Winter Soldier got made, some sort of in-universe explanation for the variance might have been created. But nobody did (to my knowledge, since I can’t find any evidence of it being discussed in articles online, nor is it currently listed on the IMDB page as of the time I’m [originally] posting this on May 12, 2021), and the show has very neatly and tidily handled Bucky’s progression beyond that part of his life and into a new healing phase, in such a way that it would honestly probably feel pretty cheap and unsatisfying to return to it if such a return was done just to clean up what was clearly an honest filmmaking error. 

For all that Zemo tells Bucky straight up that “there’s something still in there”, I really don’t expect the MCU to return to that in a literal way. 

However

The beauty of fandom is that it’s not bound to any specific timeline. I’m more intrigued just by the pure existence of possibilities and their potential ramifications than I am interested in exploring them in fan works, especially since I have my own, original writing projects that I would much rather use my time on. However, I know that there are plenty of people who could take these observations and run with them in an infinite number of fascinating directions, and I really hope that they do. 

That said, this is the one thing from this series of articles that I would really like to see people become aware of. I’m a writer who creatively thrives on taking incidental details and turning them into larger plot components, so I really want to know how the writers and directors of both Captain America: Civil War and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier would respond to this error and the potential implications it creates.

I’d also be extremely curious to see what Sebastian Stan and Daniel Bruhl think - especially in terms of how they might choose to play their respective characters in future installments - if they become aware of this detail. 

So, if any of you all want to help me make this observation go viral… that would be pretty awesome, not gonna lie.

Please and thank. <3 

Chapter Text

At last we come to the final word in the Big Three: Homecoming. Unlike the others, this one is a phrase in Russian, rather than a single word. It’s also the one that’s the most specific to nuances in that language, in a way that I may not be able to fully capture as someone who doesn’t speak it natively and has only studied it as an academic. I’m going to do my best, though. 

We’ll start with talking about the foundational concept of home in English and how that impacts our perception of homecoming, and then looking at the concept of home that’s utilized in the Russian phrase. Once we have that foundation, I will make a suggestion of what I think the Russian phrase might be better translated as into English and the ways it varies from the English concept of homecoming, as well as talk about why the dichotomy (as with Longing) works better than either word alone to give us a more rounded and relevant perspective on the character and his experiences.

Let’s get started.

Home

Search for English quotes and sayings about home, and you’ll get all kinds of results. If there’s one thing English speakers love more than being at home (well… at least before covid locked all of us inside for months on end), it’s talking about home. More than any of our other concrete nouns, this one blurs the line between being simultaneously something we can point at – the place where we live – and something much more metaphorical and emotionally significant.

Let’s take a look at a handful of interpretations from some of these sources first:

Home is where the heart is. - Traditional Saying

Probably the most common and most succinct summation of what home means in the English-language imagination, this phrase immediately zeroes in on the emotional connotation of the word. Home isn’t merely the place that we live in English; rather, home focuses on the sense of human connection and emotional refuge at least as much as (and arguably more than) the physical shelter that we make our residence in.

There’s no place like home. -L. Frank Baum

This one was made famous in the ending scene of Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy realizes that the ability to go home was within herself the entire time. Why? Well, in part because she was dreaming and just had to wake up. But more accurately in terms of the word’s connotations, it’s because home isn’t about a literal place so much as it is about a sense of belonging. Dorothy was a clear outsider in Oz, and, for all that she had felt like an outsider in Kansas at the beginning of the story, by the end of her travels she realizes that she really does belong back there.

Note that Dorothy’s association of a physical place with the concept of home is specifically the family’s farm in Kansas. We’ll come back to that.

Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there anymore. - Robin Hobb

I’ve also heard this idea sometimes phrased as “you can’t go home again” - for instance, after moving out of a shared home and, upon returning for a visit, finding that it feels different. Even if nobody else left, the dynamic of the unit shifted with the first person’s departure, and it doesn’t ever really go back.

A friend of mine who was raised in another state once described this phenomenon, when talking about visiting “back home” after having been out here for several years. Everyone there had continued to grow and change and evolve; so had he, obviously, but because there were no longer those constant connections, they had grown in entirely different directions, and what had once been effortless and familiar now felt uncomfortable and alien.

I’ve had my own similar experiences, many times. Growing up with divorced parents and shuffling back and forth at regular intervals between Mom’s apartment and Dad’s house, my experience of the concept of home-as-physical-location was completely fragmented early on, and neither place ever really felt like home in the way that other people talked about it. This was further intensified in large part because the home-as-hub-of-positive-human-relationships aspect was also deeply fraught, when it wasn’t lacking entirely.

Once I left for university, when some one or another of my peers would talk about feeling homesick, I had to admit that I didn’t. My somewhat flippant explanation was that I love my family, but I love them better from a distance. It was only after coming back from my year in the UK that I learned what homesickness felt like, because – without even realizing it – in the time I was there, I began to settle in a way that had been impossible both with my family (with all of the tensions of those relationship dynamics) and at my university (which always felt like summer camp to me, since I knew that each stint there would be limited in duration before I’d leave for a while). 

And so, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sense of that combination home-as-physical-location and home-as-hub-of-positive-human-relationships meaning was my Nana’s house. The first time I set foot inside after she passed away, it felt completely alien. For all intents and purposes, everything was still the same – her furniture was where it had always been, nobody had started going through her belongings yet, and even the lingering smell of her perfume still hung in the air. With her gone, it no longer felt the same, even beyond the anticipated sense of loss that death brings, especially in the face of so many reminders. The space itself had somehow transformed, and become just another house that I spent some time in before eventually it was sold and we no longer went back.

I had a similar experience after moving out of the place I’d lived with my last roommate. I went back a couple times to cat-sit in the year or so after I got my own apartment. The first time I went back was a very Twilight Zone kind of experience. Simultaneously just like I’d remembered it (as long as I didn’t go in my old bedroom), and yet nothing at all like I’d left it.

I share these anecdotes instead of a more formal or academic analysis here because I’m sure everyone reading this has been there as well, at some point in time, in one way or another.

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. - Maya Angelou

This quote elaborates on the emotional/social aspects of the word home. I can’t count the number of memes and posts I’ve seen over the years that basically boil down to some variation of “I want to go home, but I can’t.” The sense of not having the ability to satisfy some psychological need for safety, security, comfort, or affection is deeply troubling, and to English speakers, we often express this by saying we want to go home (even when we’re technically already there).

Here’s one I just saw while working on these articles:

Additional colloquial uses of home which reinforce this emphasis on the emotional aspects include:

Make yourself at home

Given as an invitation to close friends when they come to visit, as a way of saying that they can help themselves to anything they might need or want while they’re there. Here in the US, we don’t typically visit people where they live; most socializing takes place in public/commercial spaces, like restaurants or offices. You have to be very close with someone to be invited to their home, and even closer for them to invite you to just go rummaging around on a whim. I have several friends who are regular visitors in my apartment, and it’s always interesting to see when – and how – people choose to interpret this invitation when I give it, especially when they’re staying at my place overnight.

Nothing to write home about

A colloquial phrase for when something isn’t particular impressive, and not worth relaying to others. Since we’re social creatures, and we tend to share the things that we find exciting and appealing with those we’re close to, this reinforces the association of home to close emotional bonds.

Hearth and home

We don’t have true hearths in modern day houses; ovens and stovetops have rendered the need for large cooking fires obsolete. However, this phrase has remained in our phrase lexicon as a useful descriptor. Note that it’s hearth and home; the hearth is the physical center of homes that have them, so pairing the two words would be redundant if home didn’t carry other associated meanings.

Summation

At its core, the English concept of home revolves around affection, comfort, and safety – both physical and emotional. It’s about communal life with family and close friends, much more than it’s about the building where that communal existence takes place. This idea of home as an emotional haven is essential to understanding the concept of a homecoming in English.

Homecoming

In the American cultural imagination, a homecoming is joyful. It’s exciting, uplifting, triumphant, a celebration. It’s coming back to the place where you belong, and it’s really feeling that belonging.

• It’s family and friends waiting at the airport after you’ve been away for a long time, and all of the excited chatter and long hugs that go with that.
• It’s your favorite meal made or going to an old favorite restaurant when you come back to visit your parents as an adult, sinking back into familiar rhythms and unwinding from the stress of the day-to-day.
• It’s the high school quarterback dancing with his sweetheart at the dance after they win the big match against their biggest rivals on their team’s own turf (literally called the homecoming game).
• It’s knowing that most of the people in the stands were rooting for them because they were the home team.
• It’s a ticker-tape victory parade for soldiers returning, victorious, after WWII (in particular).
• It’s kind of trite and sepia-toned and sappy, but it’s still largely a positive thing in the cultural imagination.

It’s everything, in short, that Bucky Barnes was robbed of by Hydra.

My Russian-English dictionary gives the translation for homecoming as Возвращение домой.

For most of the English meanings of home – as well as the one in use in the compound word homecoming – the appropriate Russian word is дом (inflected in the phrase above as домой to indicate a direction oriented toward home). This is ultimately derived from the same Indo-European root as our word “domestic” which describes things that pertain to our home lives.

This word refers fairly specifically to the actual location, but it still carries some of the emotional connotations by virtues of the activities and ensuing associations that everyone eventually has with their place of residence. This word can be inflected, compounded, or used in phrases to refer to houses, to residences in the generic sense, to households, to dynasties/royal lineages, to feeling at home, to staying at home, to making oneself at home, and to the Russian folkloric spirit that lives in the house with the family.

However, that is not the phrase they used to activate the Winter Soldier. The phrase they used is Возвращение на Родину.

So what’s the difference, and what does it mean?

Возвращение на Родину  

First things first, let me explain how this phrase is constructed:  

• Возвращение is the same in both possible translations of homecoming – the one in my dictionary, and the one used in the Winter Soldier phrase. This is a noun meaning “return”. Etymologically related words include the concepts of repayment, restoration, and recovery. It’s about something coming back. 

So far so good, this is clearly matching up with the English homecoming in preserving the sense of movement, and keeping it effectively a noun phrase.

• На is a preposition in Russian. In general, it indicates direction. In this case, that the return specified by the previous word is moving toward the concept specified by the following word.
• Родину is an inflected form of the word Родина, which identifies it as part of the prepositional phrase begun by на.

Родина

My Russian-English dictionary defines this word as homeland.

It’s derived from Род, about which my etymological dictionary has this to say:

‘family, kin, origin’. 11^th century, from Church Slavonic [earlier form] 'origin, stock’, based on [even earlier form] which derives from [yet an earlier form] 'to grow, to be born’. Also the source of [another word] 'to bear’. See also 'birth’ and 'Christmas’. Derivatives include 'native’, 'people’, 'to bring forth’.

Definitions, uses, and other words derived from Род in my Russian-English dictionary include: clan, stock, genus, type, gender, generation, “of noble stock”, “comes from [country]”, “descended from”, mother tongue, forefather, founder, originator, pedigree, ancestry, family tree.

I don’t honestly know how to fully explain the depth of this root in Russian to English speakers, but I hope that you can see from these examples of related terms sort of what it is aiming at. It is not like our concepts for home, though it runs just as deep and emotionally significant.

The best way that I can think to describe the difference, is this:

In Russian, your Родина is the place that gives you roots. It’s not just the place where you were born, it’s the place where your parents were born, and their parents, and theirs. It’s the place that formed and created you, that stamps your identity and from which you can never truly be separated because it is viscerally a part of you: not just directly, but through your forebears as well. While it isn’t necessarily tied to modern borders, it’s definitely bigger than a locality; it’s at least regional, if not closer to national (by the links with native language and clan). If you move away, are taken away, or otherwise find yourself cut off from it, you don’t get a do-over or trade it in for a different one. Your Родина is your Родина is your Родина.

Meanwhile, in the English-speaking imagination, especially in the United States, our concept of home-as-physical-location is typically extremely local, and it moves with us as we grow and develop. Home starts out as the house we grew up in; over time, maybe it becomes the apartment we share with roommates who become like siblings, or the house we settle down in to have families of our own. Maybe at times the term stretches to apply to a friend’s house or a relative’s house if you’re like me, or a community organization of some kind if it forms a real hub of connections in your life, but it’s still a specific place – a house, or a neighborhood – and it may not always be the same specific place. Sometimes, it’s vastly different places, all at once.

This portability kind of makes sense given our history, right? Unless you’re Native American, in order for your family to be here, they had to decide to pick up and entirely leave another place in order to get here. If their concept of home had been “the place we’ve lived for generations, where everyone around us is kin/clan and shares our language and major facets of our identity”, then coming here would effectively mean leaving home forever, and the psychological weight of that would have been incredibly intense. We are descended from people who had to reinvent the concept of home from the place where their families had lived for generations because they were leaving the places where their families had lived for generations.  

This history with home being a more portable concept stretches back well before the colonization of the Americas, as well. The various languages in the Germanic family share this portability, where home is more emotional than physical. Taken in the context of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons who settled in England, they still had to pick up and travel an enormous distance to put down those roots.

Remember that England is on an island; nobody gets there by accidentally wandering a little too far down the road.

Even American-style excessive patriotism is a very different creature than the sense of home that Родина entails. That’s a type of pride in our cultural identity, as it were, rather than an attachment to the literal, tangible, homeland itself.

So What Would Be a Better Translation Here?

There is one English word that I can think of that better captures the connotation of the Russian phrase, but we really only use it in negative contexts (unlike Возвращение на Родину to a Russian speaker, which would have a wider range of emotional meanings).

Repatriation

A much rarer word than expatriation (or expatriates - often shortened to ex-pats), which we use to talk about Americans who decide to live abroad permanently or semi-permanently without giving up their citizenship. This word pretty much only gets used for two circumstances:

• Forced repatriation – more commonly called deportation – which is when we pitch someone out of the country and send them back to the one that they were born in for violating any of a number of rules and laws (including coming here without following all of the rules and procedures).
• Repatriation of remains is when we get another country to send back the body of someone who dies overseas so that they can be buried here by their family and friends. 

For Bucky’s narrative? This word fits perfectly.

Homecoming, Repatriation, and Bucky Barnes

Consider that Bucky Barnes the character is an American. Obvious, I know, but bear with me. This means that his baseline concept of home is home-as-human-relationships, with some hints and aspects of home-as-highly-specific-location. It’s a house in Brooklyn with his parents and sister; it’s trading affectionate insults with Steve after bailing him out of back alley fights; it’s taking girls to a science fair on a date before taking them dancing. It’s the place he grew up and the people he grew up around and the way that that shaped his concept of himself and his place in the world. At it’s “biggest”, it’s New York.

Then he gets drafted and sent overseas, where he is captured, mutilated, and brainwashed. He’s kept on ice in Siberia between missions for Hydra. Because they only pull him out when they need him to do a job, he’s rumored to be a myth, or a ghost story to borrow Natasha’s exact phrase. Nobody knows he’s alive; everyone he knew and loved dies never knowing that he’s still out there (except Steve, who is also thought to be dead for most of this time). Occasionally he gets sent back to the States on a mission – his homeland, but no longer his home, even if his original concept could have stretched that large because the brainwashing has denied him that level of emotional connection.  

Consider how distressed he is in Winter Soldier when he remembers Steve. When he remembers, on some level, that connection and belonging, that sense of having had a home once.

And then consider again the difference between the celebratory post-war homecoming and relatively normal life that he was robbed of, and the way he was eventually sent back as a criminal and as someone who was supposed to be dead - repatriation in both of its English senses. 

Finally consider how in the course of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, we watch him go from a bitter, lonely man living in a place devoid of any personal touches - clearly not a home in any sense of the English word…

…to a man who has found a new place - a new home - for this new stage of his life.

Much like with the dichotomy between Longing and Желание, both terms fit the character’s experience, but only getting one half of each coin loses something significant in terms of how these words fit and frame the character’s experience.

Chapter Text

I’m sure some of you who have seen this have been wondering why I’ve spent so much time and so many words digging into what’s supposed to be a random phrase list.

Here’s the thing: random isn’t. Not really.

If you’ve ever been asked to say something in another language that you speak, or even just asked to say something random for whatever reason, no doubt you’re familiar with the utter blankness that ensues.

This has to do with the way that language is stored, retrieved, and processed in our brains.

Language Processing in the Mind

Imagine a giant web in three dimensions. Everywhere that two or more strings cross each other, they intersect via a node. Each node can have an infinite number of strings sprouting off of it, but all nodes have to be connected to at least one other one in order to be accessible.

It is way denser and more complex than this. 

The nodes are words. Now, technically speaking, what constitutes a word is actually not that clear-cut, but that’s definitely too complicated for this metaphor/example, so let’s also specify that each node can contain compartments for inflected forms, derivations, etc, and that some of those compartments can have their own separate connections to other nodes as well, creating a highly-dynamic, tightly-networked system.

In order to make any use out of this web system, you need an entry point. Some stimulus in your environment – including your own mind – lights up a handful of nodes to enable you to formulate a statement or a question. If you’re asked what you want to eat, the first ones that will light up will be ones pertaining to specific food items, restaurants, and grocery stores, for instance, as well as words pertaining to actions you might take in relationship to those concepts (cooking, ordering, picking up, etc.).

Each of these nodes will in turn light up their own connected nodes in what’s basically the cognitive precursor to predictive text. As you speak – or someone speaks to you – some of these illuminated nodes will shut back off: say the conversation about what to eat for lunch turns to restaurants specifically, your grocery store related items will dim. Meanwhile, new ones will illuminate – perhaps ones pertaining to types of cuisine, or times and places in order to coordinate a meetup. This illumination and dimming of nodes is why, sometimes, someone says something that throws you off: your predictive text gets caught by something it wasn’t anticipating. If you were just passively receiving what they were saying, nothing could ever throw you in that way; you’d just receive it, process it after receiving it, and then decide how to respond. But this parallel processing and its predictive abilities (based on the enormous amount of language data we take in during our lifetimes) is what allows spoken communication to be such a powerful and rapid form of exchange. The occasional hiccup of surprise is a totally worthwhile trade-off for the increased possibilities and information we can engage with in conversation.

Anything that you associate with any node for any reason – emotional or metaphorical connections, semantic meanings, even just the sounds of a spoken word – can light up another node. Stepping away from the food example, this means a word like cat can light up concepts for dog, bird, and mouse as other animals we associate with cats, nap, toy, and lady as words that often pair with it in lexicalized phrases, alley, domestic, and wild as descriptors of different types of cats, hat, mat, and sat as words that rhyme, the names of people you know who own cats… etc. Each of these words can then sprawl off in just as many directions.  

You can follow related concepts to all kinds of end points; anyone who has ever ended up down the Wikipedia rabbit hole knows how easily surprising connections can be formed that take you far afield from your original point of inquiry. Hopefully this helps you to see just how quickly those surprising connections can be formed. 

In cognition, this effect is called priming, and it is well documented in both psychology and linguistics. The subconscious effects that it has on our choices and our actions are incredibly powerful.

Priming and Writing

Writing, storytelling, and character creation as processes absolutely rely on this process of networking disparate pieces of information together through the power of associations. The ability to build surprising contrasts or plot twists or unique character traits requires an intuitive understanding of information webs - both your own, and your readers’. Good writing uses as many different forms of parallel priming as possible to create the intended effect in a reader, though no doubt you’ve never heard it put that way before.

What Does This Mean for This List?

Bucky Barnes is one of the most complex characters in the MCU. Given everything that has happened to him, and the strange moral grey area that he has often occupied, he’s a character with a particularly rich set of potential associations. The fact that the writers conjured up such an evocative and intriguing, supposedly-random list of words to trigger him into the Winter Soldier cannot be separated from the fact that in designing such a list for that character, they were inherently activating their own priming systems to spit out words that pertained to that character in some capacity. Analyzing the various implications and connotations of these words is therefore an absolutely sensible – and arguably necessary – component of understanding the full depth of the character’s portrayal in-universe.

Similarly, if we entertain the conceit that such words would have been chosen by other characters in-universe, they would have been no less susceptible to the effects of priming in choosing the words to use for the activation phrase. The words may not have a literal, direct meaning, but they absolutely have an implicit and symbolic meaning for what the Hydra scientists would have been intending.

How Does This Apply to Other Writing?

Let’s talk about this meme in the context of priming:

Was the writer deliberately using blue curtains to evoke sadness and depression? Probably not. Most of us don’t think that hard about it, if we’re being honest, and the ones who do think that hard about it usually come across as amateurish or overwrought. 

However, to deny that there is a cultural association in the English-speaking world between the color blue and sadness/melancholy is to foolishly deny the power that priming has in our cognition, both as creators and as audience members. If the author had been aiming for an angry scene rather than a sad scene, the power of priming probably would have led them to describe red carpeting instead of blue curtains, just to use an off-the-top-of-my-head example.

Using the power of priming allows an author/storyteller to get past the intellectual process of “word means X, word means Y” and start playing with the raw material of your emotions and implicit associations – where the real power of stories actually lives.

That said, in the drafting stage, I wouldn’t consciously and deliberately worry about it too much. The most important thing at that point is getting the story out so that you have something to work with. Your own web of implicit and unconscious associations is going to be enough to get you to something that should be broadly relevant at a baseline level, and thinking too hard about it can lead you astray in that initial draft (much like abusing a thesaurus can also cause weird drift).

In editing, however, you really want to focus in on the various connotations of the words that you’re using. Skillful use of harmonizing words, opposing words, or words with partial overlap in different types of scenes can really help to build a specific atmosphere, while just using whatever comes to mind first may end up muddying your point, or preventing each scene from reaching its maximum potential.

I’ll probably come back and do a series on this at some point, actually. I’m realizing I have way more I want to say about this than I want to shoehorn in at the end of this conclusion.

And with that, we come to the end of this series. Thanks for joining me on this deep dive into the Winter Soldier activation phrase, and I hope you enjoyed it.

If you enjoyed this, come join me on Tumblr, where I post about writing on Mondays and Wednesdays.