In the XIX century, the verb to take care of is drawn into the orbit of "amorous" words and phrases. On the basis of its meanings "1 - to have care of someone or look after someone; 2 - to hang around someone, please someone", it develops another thing: to show a woman a love-erotic interest, seeking her favor. An example is already found in the "Stone Guest" by A. S. Pushkin:

[Leporello] Ineza! "black-eyed.".. Oh, I remember.

You've been courting for three months

Follow her; the evil one helped us with great difficulty!

In the "Story of Pushkin's relationship to Dantes" by a colleague of Zh. Dantes on the cavalry regiment of A.V. Trubetskoy (1813 - 1889), recorded from his words in 1897, was contrasted with slang

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how to hit on a more common person (Russian antiquity. 1901. January-March).

However, dictionaries of the XIX century do not note the new meaning of the verb to take care of. V. I. Dahl did not register it either.

Later, the noun suitor was formed from this meaning, which came into use already in the first years of the 20th century. So, it appears in the story of N. N. Nikandrovich ""Thief" from Quarantine " (Krymsky Vestnik. 1903. No. 76 of March 22). In the title, it is taken in quotation marks, but in the text itself, the more familiar cavalier is used instead, since the word courtship was still, apparently, a very recent neologism.

In lexicographic practice, a new noun was registered for the first time by the editor of the third edition of V. I. Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary, acad. IA Baudouin de Courtenay - and in two forms: boyfriend and wooer "courting a girl or an adult lady, saying compliments to her, etc." (V. Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary of the living Great Russian language. 3rd ispr. and significant additional ed. Edited by I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay, Moscow, 1909, Vol. IV), although I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay did not take into account the corresponding meaning of the verb to take care of.

The new formation gradually gained popularity among the broad masses and a sharp rejection of the zealots of the Russian literary language. The conflicting views were examined and received a balanced assessment by the literary critic A. G. Gornfeld, who made a report "New words and Old Words"at the teachers' congress in 1921. A fine connoisseur of the language, the aesthete A. G. Gornfeld considered such words as boyfriend, dance "vulgar", "stupid and impudent", but recognized their right to exist: "There is vulgarity in this life-this is undoubtedly true, but life is in this vulgarity -this is much more important" (Gornfeld A. G. New words and old words. Speech at the Congress of teachers of Russian language and Literature in Petrograd on September 5, 1921 (Pg. 1922). Unfortunately, the vague spelling of boyfriend adopted in the report does not allow us to judge which version of the word the author had in mind.

But do not think that the noun boyfriend immediately became widespread. The well-known linguist S. I. Kartsevsky, who worked a lot on new words in Russian at the beginning of the XX century, noted the appearance of the words conductor and alarmist at that time (Kartsevsky S. I. From the Linguistic heritage, Moscow, 2000), but the word boyfriend did not attract his attention.

There is no doubt that only the na-er form appears in L. V. Uspensky's review article "The Russian Language after the Revolution" (1931). In it, A. G. Gornfeld's objectivism was sharply criticized. The report's author's position was condemned as "half-hearted", "marked by hopeless passive-conniving pessimism" (Slavia. Casopis

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pro slovanskou filologii. Rocnik X. Seset 2. Praga, 1931). However, outwardly distancing himself from A. G. Gornfeld, L. V. Uspensky left his point of view on the neoplasms under consideration unclear.

Finally, the variant on-er was fixed by the Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language by D. N. Ushakov: "Boyfriend, a, m (colloquial). A man who likes to take care of women, red tape" (Moscow, 1940, Vol. IV). At the same time, through identification with the colloquial boyfriend, its colloquial synonym is interpreted: "Boyfriend, I, m (razg.). The same as the boyfriend".

Academician V. V. Vinogradov, who took part in editing the dictionary of D. N. Ushakov, characterized this word more harshly, calling it vulgarism (Vinogradov V. V. Modern Russian. Grammatical teaching about the word, Moscow, 1938, Issue II).

The scientist's notes on the history of the noun suitor, published as an article, have been preserved (Vinogradov V. V. Istoriya slovov, Moscow, 1999). In this article, with some hesitation, he names the approximate date of the word's appearance in the Russian language (the very end of the XIX-beginning of the XX centuries) and notes the peculiarity of its morphological structure, as well as the reasons for the ambiguous assessment of the word by contemporaries.

The unusual structure of the formation under consideration is primarily due to the fact that the Russian base is joined by the foreign-language suffix-er, "realized in such borrowed words denoting the actor as director (cf. directing), conductor (conduct), chronicler (chronicle), reporter (reportage), etc." of these nouns, only the chronicler (fr. chroniqueur) is actually borrowed, the rest have acquired their characteristic meaning in the Russian language, along with the final-ep already on Russian soil, but the trend itself, outlined by V. V. Vinogradov, remains relevant to the present time.

Words formed in the Russian language from the original foundations with the help of the suffix-er are still few and "this uniqueness, rarity of the formation of the boyfriend, its discrepancy with the literary norms of word production (...) It evokes the idea of a philistine, unintelligent, semi-cultural social environment in which this word was formed "(Vinogradov. V. V. Vinogradov gave a regional example of a similar fusion of a borrowed suffix with the original base: ""Sigher-suitor, lover. - Saratov province." And from this education, - emphasized V. V. Vinogradov, -breathes the spirit of petty-bourgeois pretentiousness. It is precisely these words that Pushkin associated with the style of "bad society"", "in the very method of forming this word there is pretentiousness, as if attempts at "Europeanism". It goes without saying that the word boyfriend arises and is used as a highly expressive word" (Ibid.).

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But at the present time, the sharpness of this feeling is gradually dulled. For example, the "Big Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language" cites this noun with the mark folk-colloquial (St. Petersburg, 1998), and the "Explanatory Word - forming dictionary" by T. E. Efremova considers it as colloquial, but not as vulgar (New Dictionary of the Russian Language. Explanatory and word-forming, Moscow, 2000, vol. 2). The word begins to migrate from everyday use to the sphere of literary language. So, it found a place in the translation of V. Nabokov's commentary to the novel "Eugene Onegin":"...If I had access to Pushkin's manuscripts, I might have been able to give a more complete and clear picture of how they reflect Pushkin - the rejected suitor and Pushkin - the artist" (Nabokov V. V. Commentary to the novel by A. S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". Translated from English St. Petersburg, 1998). In addition to the fact that in this context the word boyfriend is an anachronism, its stylistic relevance here is also questionable.

Be that as it may, the education of the suitors was granted citizenship rights and firmly established in the language. This is evidenced, in particular, by the presence of neoplasms from it: boyfriend-k-a, boyfriend-stv-o, boyfriend-sk-iy.

Moscow oblast,

Orekhovo-Zuyevo

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