I hope people see your comment and go and read the post anyway. Thank you for your interest.

http://muslimahmediawatch.blogspot.com/2007/11/between-rock-and-hard-place-triple.html

I’m dragging the chain on this one, I’m afraid. I originally lost my scorings, and now I have a bad case of procrastinitis.

It will still happen.

It’s not something I can resolve or easily explain, but (and this is a common issue for people from former communist countries) I cannot embrace the label as a neutral one. It’s interesting, don’t you think, how different concepts and historic figures resonate with different peoples. In this case it appears to be a bit of a boundary… and is a likely post candidate, when I do more research and thinking.

I’d very much like to read that post when you write it. I’m not sure about this, but I believe that some of the Anglo-Australian use of bolshie/bolshy/bolsho in more affectionate terms may also derive from two other factors:

1. various Bolshevik dissidents who escaped the purges of both Lenin and Stalin and came to England to influence the union movement, and who were proud of their original cause and strident critics of Leninist/Stalinist distortions of the Bolshevik ideals;

2. the benevolent “Uncle Joe” image of Stalin as part of the Allied propaganda of WW2, and the way that the Red Army was presented as standing up to the Nazi juggernaut so staunchly. Again, a view which would have looked very different to the people that fell behind the Iron Curtain after WW2.

I should apologize for placing his heyday according to my individual vision of how he became a legend bloated out of all proportion rather than a living leader. Sorry; it might have seemed incorrect and misleading. On the historical side, what you say is absolutely accurate. I did mean the aggression early after WWI.

As I said–and as the recurrent “for me” highlights–I wouldn’t want it to appear that I’m negating your project. I actually find it fascinating that the word “bolsho” acquired such connotation in Australian English. Again, I was totally unaware of that.

It’s not something I can resolve or easily explain, but (and this is a common issue for people from former communist countries) I cannot embrace the label as a neutral one. It’s interesting, don’t you think, how different concepts and historic figures resonate with different peoples. In this case it appears to be a bit of a boundary… and is a likely post candidate, when I do more research and thinking.

Please don’t feel obliged to defend your choice of award name. Taking the Australian perspective, it indeed makes perfect sense. From a Central-European perspective it reverberates too loudly with a history maybe even not so much of events but of the word’s usage (here’s where Bakhtin comes in). The word was used in a particular way by later communists and, whether I like it or not, those voices, uses and abuses are present within, er, the national consciousness (pardon the clumsy term) where I am from. It’s an issue for consideration not something I would want to use in order to guilt-trip someone.

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