Death by Кров (Fucking myagkiy znak)

Earlier today, I was thinking of an interesting situation involving two Russian words that are really similar to each other.

Imagine this conversation:

“Did you hear about Chris?”

“No, what happened?”

“He was in the hospital in Ukraine and really needed a blood transfusion. After explaining to the doctors that he needed this ASAP, the doctors agreed that they could airlift the rooftop of a house from Western Europe all the way to Ukraine, as long as his insurance covers it. Chris guaranteed them that the insurance would cover it. After they successfully airlifted the roof all the way to the hospital, Chris died. Fucking myagkiy znak.”

Basically, the word Кров means “roof” and the word Кровь means “blood”. There’s only a one letter difference. What makes things a bit more complicated is that you don’t actually pronounce the “ь” at the end of Кровь (called a мягкий знак or myagkiy znak). It just modifies the way you pronounce the letter in front of it. If you don’t want to learn the Cyrillic alphabet half way through this paragraph, you can think of it as blood being “Kroff” and roof being “Krof”. See how that would be confusing?

I can’t think of very many places where you might get those words mixed up, and I really doubt that they would get a new roof for somebody that needs a blood transfusion. But I do think it’s funny that those words are so similar.

I realized all of this a while ago when I saw a sign in front of a store. It said something along the lines of (what I thought was) “We sell everything for windows and blood”. I thought that was a very odd combination of things to sell, so I looked it up and figured out that they actually don’t sell blood (although you could probably find a kiosk on a street corner somewhere that sells blood for 15 griven and keeps it in between the cigarettes and cell phones, but it wouldn't be refrigerated and with consumer protection laws here, you wouldn't want to use it in a blood transfusion).