Vaimu (Vaim)

Spirit, ghost, apparition (also means: mind or mental power, or female farm laborer on corvée duty, the 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 travesty of Шпуковская улица (Shpukovskaya), the German already reminiscent more of spucken, to spit, than spookin’, and the townspeople, pitchforks in hand, rejected his counter-proposal of Нечистая улица (unholy or dirty street), so it ended up as Страшная улица, 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.