"What a fine girl! Pretty as a turnip": ethnolinguistic portrait of the turnip as a culture-specific item of the Russian language

The article studies a set of ideas characterizing the turnip image in the Russian linguistic consciousness. The factual basis for the study was the data derived from explanatory, dialect, and historical dictionaries, as well as from some ethnolinguistic sources. The authors aim to systematize and analyze linguistic material that forms the ethnolinguistic portrait of the studied culture-specific concept in the Russian language. The observations given in the work lead to the conclusion that in the turnip image the language and traditional cultural contexts reflect both the purely practical everyday view of this vegetable and the deeply archaic perception of it (its comparison with a mouse, the “femininity” inherent in the turnip image, comparing a turnip with a human head, referring to a turnip as the gold standard for vegetables, etc.). In general, the image of this culture-specific item reflected in Russian vocabulary and idiomatics allows us to reveal a number of ideas about the turnip as a plant and food product in the Russian national picture of the world.