Know Your English (Nov 2001)-6

Know your English

What is the origin of the term "Molotov cocktail"? How is the word "Molotov" pronounced?

Let me begin by telling you that this "cocktail" is no drink. A "Molotov cocktail" is a homemade firebomb! It usually consists of an inflammable liquid in a bottle to which a wick is attached. The wick is then lit and the bottle is thrown at someone or something. The result? The bottle explodes and the object catches fire. We see a lot of such bombs used by the villains in our regional films. "Molotov cocktail" is named after V. M. Molotov, the man who was the Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union during World War II. When the Nazis invaded Russia during the Second World War, the Russian civilians used this cocktail quite successfully to destroy the German tanks. The phrase has been quite common since the 1940s.

As for the pronunciation, well, the first and third "o" in "Molotov" are pronounced like the "o" in "bob", "mob", and "sob". The second "o" is like the "a" in, "China" and the final "v" sounds like the "f" in "fish", "fee", and "fit".

Source:

The Hindu daily, Tuesday, November 06, 2001