I was walking up the long, sloping, glass-enclosed gangplank (maybe it's called something else) to the Crown of Skandian ferry. This ferry is a huge, twelve-decked ship that lets several hundred cars and several thousand passengers into its "belly". He was traveling from Copenhagen to Stockholm. At the end of the ladder, at the level of the seventh deck, passengers were greeted by an inscription in several languages, including Russian: "Please show your ticket to the watch". I immediately told the passenger's assistant, who was overseeing the landing, that the inscription in Russian looked comical due to mistakes. He asked me to stay where I was and ran to get my notebook and pen. I changed the " z " to " w " (not taking into account the alternation) and wrote a clear "on watch". The captain expressed his gratitude with a big smile and a pat on the shoulder, and then I went back to my cabin. A few years earlier, I was lucky enough to visit France, Monaco and, of course, I went to the Yves Cousteau Oceanographic Museum. A magnificent museum! Each floor has its own exposition, most of all I was struck by aquariums with strange fish. And in one of the halls where there were stuffed large marine animals, among whales and sharks, I saw "our" impressive size of a polar dolphin - beluga (its length reaches 6 m, weight - 2 tons). But I read "beluga"on the sign. How so beluga? A beluga is a fish, and a beluga is a dolphin. By the way, do you know where and how the expression "roaring beluga" came from? Belugas, fish, of course, do not roar (remember, as in page 126 Marshakov's "Tale of a silly mouse", the main character refused the services of a fish, because she sang "very quietly"?). But belugas roar. I myself heard in the dolphinarium how, at the sign of the trainer, the beluga began to roar. So where did this expression "roar like a beluga" come from, why did it take root? This is probably because only those who lived on the shores of the northern seas (White, Barents), ... Read more