The phraseology "from dirt to prince"

The theme of this article is a well-known phraseology "from mud to riches". Where did he come from? Dal's dictionary contains its primary form - the proverb, known in the 19th century, which includes the words discarded by condensation. At first the old people said: "They're taken from the mud," and then they added: "... planted in princes." The basis of phraseology is, as you understand, a metaphor, implying a spasmodic change in the position of a person in society through rapid enrichment. What is the metaphor? On the one hand, the initial state is correlated - poverty with dirt, on the other - a higher social level, which is most often associated with wealth, that is, with the status of a prince. It is precisely speed that is meant when two opposite concepts are correlated with the help of rhyme, which gives the general dynamics of phraseology "from mud to riches".

Origin

When did the proverb appear? It is obvious that in Ancient Rus the phrase "from dirt to princes" could not arise. The title was passed from father to son. Prince could not become neither boyars nor nobles (arisen as a narrow social layer of the military under the prince in the XII century). The situation did not change in the 16th century, under Tsar John IV (Ivan the Terrible), when the nobles equalized their rights with boyars. The principle of "swayed" in the XVII century, when the second king of the Romanov dynasty, Alexei Mikhailovich, plentifully erected various nobles in princely titles, exceeding the number of "gifted princes" over the ancestral. However, a real "turning point" came in the XVIII century, when the tsar-reformer Peter I introduced the practice of awarding the princely title for his merits "before the Tsar and the Fatherland." The first man, granted the title of Prince, - Menshikov, "a happy beggar's soul", as AS Pushkin wrote about him. A man worthy, no doubt. But is not the phrase of the poet itself analogous to "from dirt to princes"? The text is essentially the same. It was the "awarded princes", whose number was many times greater than the ancestral ones, later, in the 19th century, served as the basis for the creation of this pejorative phraseology.

Contemporary context

How is the phrase "from dirt to princes" used in our time? In the virtual XXI century, mainly due to crises (which in the context of the Chinese language, as we know, have the meaning of "opportunity"), individual individuals quickly became rich, nouveau riche. Some of them, not having learned to make other people happy, have acquired reflexes, "how to pull on themselves" a cash pie. Here we must specify specifically for readers that we are not talking about those rich people who perceive personal wealth as an opportunity to invest in society, but relationships with other people as cooperation. That, as they say, God gave wealth. Thus, the essence of the proverb today is the emphasis on the broken harmony between the material status and the intellectual, spiritual world of the person who has become rich. Often a synonymous phraseology for him is a "crow in peacock feathers." Proverb is in demand in fiction. "If you are not in this world, or From dirt to princes" - a book with this name came from the pen of Marina Rybitskaya and Julia Slavachevskaya.