Preved Medved

Preved (Russian: Преве́д) is a meme in the Russian-speaking Internet which developed out of a heavily-circulated picture, and consists of choosing alternative spellings for words for comic effect. The picture, a modified version of John Lurie’s watercolor Bear Surprise, whose popularity was stoked by emails and blogs, features a man and a woman having sex in the clearing of a forest, when suddenly a bear comes out, and with paws raised, says “Surprise!” in the original version, or “Preved!” (a misspelling of privet, приве́т – “hi!”) in the Russian adaptation. In keeping with another popular trend of image manipulation, the iconic bear (dubbed Medved (errant медведь – bear) has been inserted into many other pictures where his appearance adds a new dimension to the joke.

The word and the bear image was incorporated by the mainstream mass media such as the Russian edition of Newsweek (see the poster). On July 6, 2006 there was an online conference of Vladimir Putin prior to which the question “PREVED, Vladimir Vladimirovich! How do you regard MEDVED?” became the most popular (28424 votes). No answer was given, but the Associated Press, informing on the questions collection process, reportedly interpreted it as a reference to then-vice-prime-minister Dmitry Medvedev. (The third most popular question was “How does one patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?”.)

Preved is identified by a specific pattern of alternate spelling which emerged from the word. In this pattern, voiceless consonants are replaced with their voiced counterparts, and unstressed vowels are interchanged pair-wise – a and o stand in for each other, as do e and i. The words уча́снег (uchasneg, errant участник (uchastnik), “user” or “participant”), preved itself, and кагдила (kagdila, errant как дела (kak dela), “how are you”) illustrate this pattern.

The larger trend of alternate spellings, called “olbansky yazyk” (”Olbanian language”, misspelled “Albanian”) developed from the padonki movement which originated on sites such as udaff.com. That trend uses the opposite conversion from the Preved trend – voiced consonants are replaced with their voiceless counterparts (which are sometimes doubled). For vowels, o is replaced with a and e with i. For example, ‘ávtor’ (author) would be spelled ‘áfftar’ or ‘aftar’, ‘podónok’ (scum) as ‘padónag’, etc.