Law & order

All the Russian Words You Need to Discuss the Litvinenko Inquiry

The official Russian response to the report on the Litvinenko inquiry released last week was, predictably, offhand and dismissive, referring to it as "некое расследование" (so-called investigation ).

But a lot of Russian journalists paid attention to it, in particular to the section assigning ultimate blame. The only problem was: no one could quite decide how to translate the key sentence — or rather one little word in it: probably.

Before you snort about looking it up in a dictionary, let's recall how subtle some of the distinctions of probability are in English and how difficult they are for foreigners to grasp. Take this list: "He might come to the party. He may come. He could come. Maybe he'll come. He'll probably come. He's likely to come." Russians read that and scream.