Soon the foreign term VIP will make its way in the Armenian explanatory dictionaries and obviously the meaning will be different. VIP is the abbreviation for “very important person”. But Armenian philologists will be forced to think hard, consult with influential parties to find the explanation of this word and understand who or what is that VIP, which can be seen in Armenian life in different modes.
The man with the leather coat and unshaven face at the VIP hall of the airport talks on the phone loudly in order to bother everyone and says the following when his friend on the other line asks him “where are you?”: “I’m at the VIP”. By saying that, he’s not saying where he is located, but rather is expressing his psychological state of being. You feel that when you see the expression on the face of the government official whom he is greeting at the airport-ignorance towards everything that doesn’t have to do with that three-letter word.
Then one day you take your average car to the car wash located in the heart of the city and without knowing, hand your keys to the valet parking worker. The worker checks your car and after greeting the government official with that look on his face says to you: “Hey, bro, we only wash VIP cars here.”
One day, you have to get somewhere fast and need a cab; you call the taxi service and ask for a cab. A female operator whispers on the other end: VIP SERVICE. You get afraid at first, thinking how can I be VIP, but you take the risk and tell her where you are and where you have to go. The operator tells you in a civilized manner that the car will arrive in ten minutes and that she will call you. You wait. After ten minutes you dial the number. The female operator tells you to wait another five minutes. You say fine, after all, there is heavy traffic on the streets. You wait another five minutes, but she doesn’t call. Perhaps the girl is saying ‘let him call’. Since you’re in a hurry, you call again. “The cab will be there in four minutes.” But what’s she’s really saying is to not leave the house, but rather wait for her call. So, you wait. After waiting for four minutes, you call again because she has decided not to call you. “It’ll be there in one minute, come outside,” says the girl and hangs up. You leave the house. The taxi is waiting fifty meters away from your house. You approach the cab and it’s that taxi. You recognize the car by the letters VIP on the door, but suddenly you see that one of the back tires of the taxi you had been waiting for long is missing, the car is leaning on a “domcrat”( pedestal) and the driver is trying to find something from the trunk. After ten minutes, when you have already decided to use your feet, which is the very first means of transportation known to man, your phone rings and they tell you that the service has sent another car and it’s there. Add ten to twenty minutes and you get thirty minutes; you realize that during that time you could have made it from central Yerevan to the outskirts.
Now the reader may ask why I’m writing about this. I agree, but I keep worrying over the future of Armenian philologists. How long do they have to work to find the correct explanation of the word VIP? If they take a look at the government official at the airport or his driver or his bodyguard, VIP will mean ignorance, arrogance, etc. There will be a couple of meanings for VIP at the car wash: a. a type of car, which has been produced in the third millennium in the West, b. person, who is becoming self-independent by washing the cars stated in “a”, and c. discrimination of levels of society.
The approach is going to be more abstract in the case of the taxi service. VIP will mean clumsiness. This will probably be the most correct explanation because Armenia, which at first sight reminds you of VIP-a place for special people-is clumsy at the social and cultural levels. If we picture this, Armenia is like the car with the word VIP printed on the door and instead of the fourth wheel, you have the “domcrat” (pedestal), which for some reason Armenians pronounce “dangrat”, perhaps in order to have philologists do something new. Why not? Any clever philologist may etymologize the word “dangrat” and find out that the root of that word in the dialect of Karabakh is “dangla” (used to express stupidity). In other words, first it was danglat, then slowly went through phonological reforms and turned into dangrat, which is the Armenian reality of today-a little better than Georgia but very far from being Belgium.