Vaimu (Vaim)

Spirit, ghost, apparition (also means: mind or mental power, or female farm laborer on corvée duty, the one-time compulsory service on a manor). At first glance, a shortening of ‘holy ghost’, this is not certain; MLG tended to use hillige gēst, etc., for that (see Pühavaimu). Since the earliest records (1694 onwards) give German Spockstraße, it may well be a vestige of Reformation jabs at the Catholic rite (where lengthening the ‘o’ in spȫk was intended to make it sound more foolish?), warping into Spuk-/Spuck- straße/gasse (ghost or revenant street, 1717 on). In 1872, ‘translating’ the German into Russian caused buckets of grief all round: the governor didn’t accept the grotesque Russo-German travesty of Шпуковская (Shpukovskaya), the German already reminiscent more of spitting (spucken) than spookin’ (spuken), and the townspeople, pitchforks in hand, rejected his counter-proposal of Нечистая (Nechistaya, unholy or dirty), so it ended up as Страшная (Strashnaya, Scary or Terrible, in the sense of that which engenders terror) street (1907). The Soviets, anti-superstitious and prosaic to the last, renamed it Vana, Old (1950-1987), see Marta.