«Alas, all this is just pluperfect for them»: a linguistic term as a language metaphor

The paper presents metaphorical uses of the Russian word pljuskvamperfekt(um) ‘Pluperfect’ as an image of literature and journalism during different periods. It is shown that the semantic associations of this word in non-linguistic contexts are strikingly close to the typology of the pluperfect semantics in the languages of the world.