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December 28, 2025

The hill I will die on: Faux Cyrillic is a load of old crдp

To the designers of film posters, I suppose it looks cleverly exotic – but there are 250 million readers of Cyrillic globally, and its misuse grinds our gears

The hill I will die on: Faux Cyrillic is a load of old crдp

TL;DR

  • The incorrect use of Cyrillic characters in media, termed 'faux Cyrillic', is an annoyance to those familiar with the alphabet.
  • Examples of faux Cyrillic include 'STДLIN' for Stalin, and the movie titles 'The Death of Stalin', 'Chernobyl Diaries', and 'Borat'.
  • This design choice aims to suggest an Eastern European or Soviet connection, often for a sense of exoticism or creepiness.
  • The author compares this to the misuse of umlauts in heavy metal band names, such as Mötley Crüe and Motörhead, where the umlaut is used for aesthetic or 'mean' effect rather than linguistic accuracy.
  • Both faux Cyrillic and unnecessary umlauts are seen as attempts to signify 'otherness' or an 'in-group' status, often with silly or nonsensical results.

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