narrator to have a unique voice that would remain ageless, while reinforcing Alex's indifference to his society's norms, and to suggest that youth subculture was independent from the rest of society. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex's interrogators describe the source of his argot as "subliminal penetration". Russian influences Russian influences play the biggest role in Nadsat. Most of those Russian-influenced words are slightly anglicized loan-words, often maintaining the original Russian pronunciation. One example is the Russian word , which is anglicized to , meaning 'people'. Another Russian word is which is anglicized to , meaning 'grandmother', 'old woman'. Some of the anglicised words are truncated, for example from , 'to understand', or otherwise shortened, for example from , 'person, man' (though the anglicized word is also used in the book). A further means of constructing Nadsat words is the employment of homophones (known as folk etymology). For example, one Nadsat term which may seem like an English composition, , actually stems from the Russian word for 'good'; , which sounds similar to . In this same manner many of the Russian loan-words become an English–Russian hybrid, with Russian origins, and English spellings and pronunciations. A further example is the Russian word for 'head', , which sounds similar to Gulliver known from Gulliver’s Travels; became the Nadsat expression for the concept 'head'. Many of Burgess's loanwords, such as ('girl') and ('friend') maintain both their relative spelling and meaning over the course of translation. Other influences Additional words were borrowed from other languages: A (possibly Saudi-owned) hotel was named 'Al Idayyin, an Arabic-sounding variant on “Holiday Inn” Hotel chain, while also alluding to the name Aladdin. Word derivation by common techniques Nadsat's English slang is constructed with common language-formation techniques. Some words are blended, others clipped or compounded. In Nadsat language a 'fit of laughter' becomes a (shortened version of guffawing); a 'skeleton key' becomes a ('many keys'); and the 'state jail' is blended to the , which has the double entendre , so that its prisoners got there by a staged act of corruption, as revenge by the state, an interpretation that would fit smoothly into the storyline. Many common English slang terms are simply shortened. A cancer stick, which is (or was) a common English-slang expression for a cigarette, is shortened to a . Rhyming slang This feature of Nadsat is derived from Cockney. = 'chaplain' Chaplain and Chaplin (from