Word mystery: solved

For as long as I can remember, Elena has been using the word "foochi." We thought, for the longest time, that this was just little-kid-nonsense word that she'd made up, and remained enamored of.

But then something clicked: I noticed that she always used the word in the same context: when she woke up, she'd cover her head with the sheet, as if she were a ghost, and say, "this is my foochi sheet," or "I'm a little foochi baby." So maybe... maybe she's remembering something amusing or important from her time in Kotlas, and "foochi" is Russian for "sheet" or "ghost" or "baby" or something. It sounds Russian, right?

Except it's apparently not Russian. I looked it up, using Google translate, and there's no Russian word close to "foochi."

So there it stood for a while, until this weekend, when I had an epiphany: there may be no Russian word quite like "foochi," but neither are there English words quite like "somefink" or "muffroom," both words which Elena also uses quite a bit. One shouldn't, in other words, put too much stock in the pronunciation of a five-year-old, especially one using a two-year-old's memories. So maybe "foochi" is really "thoochi" or "shoochi" or something.

And, lo and behold, шучу (pronounced "shuchu") is indeed a Russian word. It means "joking" or "kidding;" in the sense of "silly," I assume. As in, "I'm a little joking baby," or "I'm a silly little baby."

Google Translate has a "listen" feature, where you can hear a word's pronunciation. I turned it on and called Elena into the room. "Elena, what's this?" asked, and played "shuchu" back.

Her face lit up. "Foochi!" she said.

I added a word to the translation - малышка ("malyshka"), meaning "baby" to make "shuchu malyshka," or "joking baby." "Who's this?" I asked, and played it back to her.

"Me!"

That's about as close as you can get to a confirmation that "foochi" = "shuchu" = "joking/silly." And it gives us a bit of an insight into something Elena must have done when she was little: hiding under a sheet or blanket and making the orphanage nurses laugh. "Shuchu malyshka," they called her...and she never forgot it.