Several acquaintances, having read my complaint about the Russian title of Project Hail Mary, have written to say that it is not actually "Ave Maria" but sporting slang, meaning a desperate pass in American football, or a last hope

Several acquaintances, having read my complaint about the Russian title of Project Hail Mary, have written to say that it is not actually "Ave Maria" but sporting slang, meaning a desperate pass in American football, or a last hope. My dear Ted Lassos, my very own Utkins! The point is precisely not the additional meanings of a perfectly specific phrase. In the English version it can be, at one and the same time, a prayer to the Mother of God and a miraculous throw at the end of a match. I, for my part, have never watched American football and am not versed in its slang.

Someone will say that the idiom has already undergone a process of desacralisation, and that English speakers saying Hail Mary may very well mean no appeal to the Mother of God whatsoever, though that sounds extremely odd. This is, after all, not the English equivalent of saying "thank you" without any thought of God. Be that as it may, etymologically and culturally the religious layer is alive and, for anyone who cares to look, easily read.

What is wrong with "Project Doomsday" (the Russian "Проект Конец света", literally "Project End of the World")? Practically everything. The end of the world is the end of the world; it has no phraseological depth. It is not even a "lights out", but a flat descriptive label that alludes to nothing and carries none of the ideas embedded in it, and I would stress that these were embedded not by the director or the film crew but by the author of the book "Project Hail Mary", which served as the source of the plot.

This is neither the first nor the last film to be poorly adapted to foreign-language realities by a distribution company, and I usually pass over such unfortunate adaptations, but in this case the author encoded a profound credo in the title, while the film reached the cinemas under a title that says "what the film is about". These are different ways of working with the word.