In Old Church Slavonic, a literary language used in Slavic countries in the first millennium (and still evident in, among other things, the current Russian Orthodox liturgy), the idiom for “say” was “be like.”
This means that a literal translation of the Bible would be full of things like this:
“Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and was like, What seek ye? They were like, Rabbi, where dwellest thou?”
I’m not really interested in converting to Russian Orthodox Christianity but if I were considering it this would definitely be in the plus column.
And then we were like, this blog is great.
Gosh, poppet, the things you know.
“Everything old is new again…”
In old church slavonic, the word “zhivago” meant “life” or some variant thereof.
So the opening paragraph of an unnamed novel, in which is described the funeral of the young protagonist’s father, the following exchange between two bystanders pretty much gave the show away:
Person 1: “Who are they burying?”
Person 2: “Zhivago.”