One of the worst bugbears to possess is one that is shared by hardly anyone else. It’s lonely being the only person who cares about something. It’s even lonelier when the thing you care about makes you want to stamp your feet, tear your hair out and run naked into the streets while making the face of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. And so it is for me whenever I see a film poster, headline, book cover or screen caption featuring the incorrect use of the Cyrillic alphabet.
You might think this is a niche preoccupation. But you would be surprised how many times the name of “STДLIN” pops up in poster designs, supposedly representing “STALIN”. This phenomenon annoys me most when the entity depicted is not fictional. If you write the (nonexistent-in-any-language) word “STДLIN” instead of “STALIN” you are writing “STDLIN”. Which would be fine if you were attempting some kind of wordplay comparing the impact of the one-time Soviet leader to a sexually transmitted disease. But clever wordplay is not the intention of these designs. The intention of the incorrect use of the Cyrillic alphabet is to indicate one thing and one thing alone: “This is about something that is happening east of Warsaw! It is probably connected to the former Soviet Union! It should give you a frisson of creepy exoticism!”
