Politics in Kyrgyzstan are colorful. So are their contributions to the popular lexicon.
 
Take former (and now imprisoned) President Almazbek Atambayev and his go-to compound word “altyndarym,” which translates as “my dear little golden ones.” He regularly used this decidedly supercilious term of affection to address his public, but the word came in time to be used ironically to satirize the way in which public officials patronize the public. Another memorable Atambayev contribution was “chimkiriki” (snot-noses), his tellingly contemptuous descriptor for members of parliament.
 
Atambayev’s hand-picked successor and then nemesis, Sooronbai Jeenbekov, was a dull-as-ditchwater type and often cheerless with it. The best he could manage was “chik eshikke” (get out of here), a Trumpian phrase of dismissal he directed at officials so frequently that it became part of his brand.
 
Members of parliament do their bit too. Vocally homophobic lawmaker Tazabek Ikramov once contrived to verbally mangle the object of his contempt so horribly that it came out as something closer to “Gomo Sex Salute.” This earned him the enduring nickname of “Sex Salute.”
 
Lexical inventiveness is as healthy as ever under the rule of President Sadyr Japarov. The phrase most indelibly associated with Japarov is one that his fanatical supporters would deploy during the unruly rallies that paved his way to power last year. As screamed by his fans, the Russian phrase “do kontsa” (all the way to the end) metamorphosed into the more comical sounding “dakansa.” The word has now entered common parlance – it is not unusual to see #даканса appended to social media posts about work and study deadlines.
 
After Japarov became president, he vowed to fill up the state’s bare coffers by forcing corrupt officials to “puke up” cash in exchange for avoiding prosecutions. The key Kyrgyz verb there being “kusturup” (puke).
 
“For 15 years already we’ve been asking them, but they haven’t puked up a single penny,” he fumed in December. “If we stick them in prison, we’ll only be wasting money on them. Better make them puke.”
 
Japarov has used this verb so often that it has now acquired a certain veneer of political science-ish respectability. The Russified “kusturizatsiya” has, accordingly, become a commonplace technical term to describe a form of plea-bargaining by corruption suspects. 
 
-Ayzirek Imanaliyeva