Politicians love peppering their speeches with idioms in an effort to sound decisive (usually they aren’t) and like one of us (ditto). You can always count on hearing that it’s time to roll up our sleeves, put the nose to the grindstone, clear the decks, see eye to eye, stop sticking our heads in the sand, and put this thing to bed. If the speech goes well, at best there’s a bump in the politician’s popularity. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, therefore, must be regretting his unfortunate choice of words in a recent speech about the importance of technology to the nation’s economy. He told citizens to “get undressed and work till you sweat.”
“He had been intending to encourage people to ‘develop themselves’ –which sounds very similar to ‘get undressed’ in Russian,” reports the Guardian. Thousands of people took him literally, posting naked office selfies on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and now the hashtag #раздеватьсяиработать (#getnakedatwork) is trending on social media across the Baltic states.
