Whose shoe is it, anyway?

A portrait of the modern newcomer, or the quick-start syndrome: watch three or four YouTube videos, read some AI summaries and suddenly you are a fully fledged member of the industry.

Hence the highly intellectual headline on Bukovyna’s official site, ‘Bukovyna and Kolos split the points’. A point and a half each, apparently. And you hear and read that other Ukrainian media favourite, the misuse of the word for ‘professional’ in ‘professional teams’ and ‘professional footballers’, everywhere.

The saddest part is that you can’t tell anyone. Everyone is a writer, a master of the spoken word and cleverer than the next person. They take offence and puff themselves up instead of stopping to think about Ukrainian phrases like ‘take points against Shakhtar’ or ‘an attack from Dynamo’. How do you take something against someone or mount an attack from a team? What language is that? Is it any wonder the word for professional is being mangled too? It’s the classic Dunning–Kruger effect, the illusion of competence.

We make no claim to impeccable grammar or literary elegance. We can at least ask simple questions. If you take something, whom do you take it from? Your mum, your brother, your friend, Shakhtar. Whose attack is it? Whose shot? Dynamo’s attack, Morozko’s shot. Why on earth wedge in the Ukrainian preposition ‘від’ (‘from’)? Put it beside the Obolon midfielder’s surname and the result turns vulgar. Worst of all, the mangled forms stick in people’s heads better than the right ones.

Unfortunately, most people couldn’t care less about this linguistic fast food. In the end it will be the dilettantes, rather than the fools, who do the world in.