1900in autumn.

A coat, a piece of furniture or an idea that has aged badly can be “from 1900, in autumn”. The round year pushes it into the past. The season adds comic precision: as if someone could still remember the leaves. These examples were written for this page.

There is a printed trace. “Trenul” (The train), a poem by Axente Pop in the 14 October 1989 issue of Luceafărul, begins “cam prin o mie nouă sute toamna”: roughly, sometime in nineteen hundred, in autumn. A train passes through a landscape of memory; the phrase belongs to its uncertain time.

The opening “cam” — roughly — does something lovely. It places uncertainty before a date that seemed settled. Read this way, the expression resembles a memory that kept its atmosphere and lost its calendar.

Osman Pazvantoğlu was a rebellious regional ruler based in Vidin. He revolted against Ottoman authority in 1795. The siege of 1798 failed to defeat him; in 1799, the power he had fought granted him the rank of vizier. He died in January 1807.

In Șăineanu’s 1929 dictionary, “Pazvantoglu” could also mean “rebel, tyrant”. A 2007 slang dictionary explains “from the days of one-eyed Pazvante” as a very distant past. The name has two documented jobs: describing a person and ageing a world. These sources do not establish a transition from one meaning to the other.

The name outlasts the biography. Using the phrase does not require reconstructing the wars around Vidin. A memorable character with a nickname is enough to carry everything that seems hopelessly out of date.

Historian Valentin Constantinov quotes Miron Costin’s explanation linking Ștefăniță Lupu’s nickname to famine: people had been reduced to eating dried, ground papură. A food of desperation became attached to the ruler’s name.

Scriban records “to be from the time of Papură Vodă” in 1939, meaning antiquated or ridiculous through age. The expression can raise a smile long after the circumstances behind the nickname have been forgotten.

A short phrase holds two very different tones together: the speaker’s amusement and the deprivation of people who lived through the time being invoked. That distance makes its story more unsettling than a dictionary gloss.

In the opening of “Youth without age and life without death”, collected by Petre Ispirescu, the flea gets 99 oca of iron on one leg, then jumps to heaven to fetch stories. The precise number makes the impossibility even more vivid.

In the excerpt from the Paralela 45 edition of “Golden-haired Prince Charming”, the weight is 90 oca. The heel still remains bare, and the flea finds the load light. The tales keep different accounts of the iron, while preserving the disproportion between the tiny creature and its enormous equipment.

In the same opening world, bears fight in their tails, wolves embrace lambs and a fly signs its name on the wall. A few ordinary rules have been turned upside down. By the time the story proper begins, the reader has already crossed the threshold.

In volume IV of “Proverbele românilor”, published in 1900, Zanne records “A plăti la Sântu-Așteptă” — paying on Saint Keep-Waiting’s day. His gloss is brief: never. The debt seems to acquire a due date, but that day will not arrive.

The phrase uses familiar materials: a saint, a feast, the habit of setting payment for a known day. “Keep waiting” takes the place of the name and breaks the mechanism. The calendar still looks like a calendar, although the required date is missing.

On the same page, Zanne sets it beside the French week with four Thursdays. The comparison shows that more than one language can imagine this kind of postponement. Each gives the calendar a different fault.