Breakdown of У меня плохая память, всё всегда вылетает из головы.
плохой
bad
всегда
always
меня
me
у
at, by
из
out of
весь
all, the whole, everything, everyone
память
the memory
голова
head
вылетать
to fly out / slip mind (impf)
Questions & Answers about У меня плохая память, всё всегда вылетает из головы.
Why use вылетает, a verb of motion, to talk about memory?
The verb вылетает comes from лететь (to fly) plus the prefix вы- (out of). While literally meaning 'flies out', the phrase вылетать из головы is a very common metaphorical idiom meaning 'to slip your mind' or 'to forget'. Russian often uses verbs of motion to vividly describe mental or abstract processes.
How would I change вылетает if I wanted to say something slipped my mind just this once, rather than всегда?
Because the sentence has всегда (always), it uses the imperfective вылетает for a habitual action. If you forgot something just one time, you would use the perfective verb вылететь in the past tense. For example: Ой, это вылетело из головы! (Oh, it completely slipped my mind!).
Why do we use the preposition из and the genitive case головы here?
When verbs of motion have the prefix вы- (indicating motion from inside to outside), they almost always pair with the preposition из + Genitive case to show the origin point. Here, the imaginary container the thought is leaving is the head, so голова takes the Genitive form головы.
If I wanted to say 'I forgot his name' using this idiom, how do I structure it?
In this idiom, the thing you forgot acts as the grammatical subject (the thing doing the flying). You don't use 'I' as the subject, but rather 'His name flew out of my head'. To include yourself as the person experiencing the forgetting, use у меня. The translation would be: Его имя вылетело у меня из головы.
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