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It sounded like:

Имели мелия твоя неделя!

I heard this line in a movie clip and everyone laughed. A guy went by his office on his day off and said it to a coworker, in response to something she said that I didn't understand at all. It must be a cultural inside joke. Could someone explain? Sorry, I wrote it as I heard it - probably way off!

Glorfindel
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CocoPop
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    Actually it is Мели, Емеля, твоя неделя! You can check some dictionary for its meaning. E. g. Wiktionary. – Dmitry Alexandrov Jul 30 '14 at 13:44
  • Thank you for clearing it up. I've tried to find it in Yandex, PONS, ГРАМОТА.РУ, Толковый словарь and nothing. I tried Google, but all the explanations are in difficult Russian. I seem to recall a website where one could post hairy questions such as this one and the helpful natives would offer their cultural insights... Any ideas? – CocoPop Jul 30 '14 at 14:03

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It's an idiom, the correct form of it is "Мели́, Еме́ля, твоя́ неде́ля". It's colloquial, it expresses disbelief in what another person says while being unable to stop or influence the speaker in a way.

Еме́ля is short for the name Емелья́н, the whole phrase can be translated as "Grind, Yemelyan, it's your week." It originated in the times when in big peasant families each member did just one kind of household work, and each week the work one did changed. Grinding grain on a hand-powered grinding wheel was difficult work, so the phrase was jokingly said to someone who was lazy. In addition, моло́ть языко́м, 'to grind with one's tongue', or simply моло́ть is another idiom meaning 'to say nonsense', like here:

"Что ты ме́лешь?" - 'What nonsense you are saying!'

So the general idea of Мели́, Еме́ля, твоя́ неде́ля is something like "stop saying nonsense and do some work."

Yellow Sky
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  • So basically the guy in the movie was saying "shut up and get back to work" to his co-worker (jokingly)? – CocoPop Jul 30 '14 at 14:09
  • @CocoPop - Most often it means "you're talking too much nonsense (and doing nothing else)", what connotations it can have in each particular situation is difficult for me to say, especially when we don't know what phrase it was the response to. The part in brackets could be not meant at all. – Yellow Sky Jul 30 '14 at 14:15
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    @CocoPop No, it is ironic: "Yeah, right, keep talking". – Artemix Jul 30 '14 at 14:16
  • @CocoPop I do not know what movie you are talking about, but most probably, no. Maybe he was saying that he lost hope of stopping his co-worker twaddle / lie / say nonsense and now will just stop listening him and wait until he become silent by oneself. – Dmitry Alexandrov Jul 30 '14 at 14:17