Hippos with fake horns?

Students sometimes write things that baffle or cast you into despair. But sometimes their cluelessness actually makes you laugh.

One of them did so today.

They're translating an article written by Melor Sturua ("written by" is a phrase here used to mean "translated into Russian after stealing it from three American publications)(okay, somewhat unfair, he did write a couple of paragraphs on his own - including this one) called Банкиров к стенке или к кормушке? (Bankers to the wall, or the feed trough?) It begins with this, which has a rather awkward use of the verb бороздить, which means "to plow" except with ships, where it means "to range, to ply, to prowl".

Марсианину, свалившемуся на землю и оказавшемуся на территории США, от непривычки или неосведомленности может показаться, что этот оазис свободного предпринимательства бороздит если не крейсер "Аврора", то во всяком случае брононосец "Потемкин". В газетном киоске на Таймс-Сквер в Нью-Йорке наш (или их?) марсианин может купить журнал "Ньюсуик" за 16 февраля, на обложке которого гигантскими буквами написано: "Сегодня все мы социалисты".

So, a translation of this would be something like (the Russian is a bit awkward):

To a Martian fallen to Earth and finding himself in the US, it might seem - due to his being out of place or to his ignorance - that this oasis of free enterprise is being patrolled by, if not the cruiser Aurora, then at any rate the battleship Potemkin. At news stands in New York's Times Square our (or is it "their"?) Martian could buy the Feb. 16 edition of Newsweek, on the cover of which is written in giant letters: "We're all socialists now."

I'm fairly confident that most of them have no idea what the cruiser Aurora or the battleship Potemkin are. I'm certain this one doesn't. She looked at the word броненосец, which is literally "armor-carrier" and has a couple of meanings besides battleship (armadillo, for one, and "ironsides" for another), and thought she recognized it. Unfortunately, she confused it with носорог.

Yep. Her oasis has a wake from an Aurora cruiser and ... a Potemkin rhinoceros.

I'm still chuckling.

(For the curious, броненосец is bron- armor and nos- carry + -ets one who; while носорог is nos- nose (an unrelated root to carry) and rog- horn, so a calque of rhinoceros.)