"Nothing" is a word that is quite rare in the speech of educated people. You can even say that it is completely absent in the vocabulary of many. Even if you do not know the meaning of this term, you probably understand: the word "empty" is jargon. And here a surprise may be waiting for you, because you can meet this term even in the explanatory dictionaries of Ozhegov and Ushakov.
So why did the word with a completely harmless interpretation receive such “dark glory”?
Porozhniak: dictionary meaning
If we turn to the dictionary, we will find an explanation that the empty - just empty wagons. Use it to indicate a composition that is not loaded with anything. Typically, freight trains transport goods to their destination, and then return empty. In Ukrainian and spoken Russian, the word “empty” sounds like “empty”. So the term "empty" appeared.
But why is this word more commonly used as jargon?
Slang meaning of the word "empty"
To begin with, we recall that jargon is a special social subset of the dialect. He does not have his own separate rules for constructing sentences, punctuation or spelling laws. However, it differs from ordinary speech in the use of special words (jargon) and increased expressivity.
It is believed that jargon are weeds of pure Russian speech. Therefore, educated and educated people should avoid them. The main categories that use jargon are: youth, criminals, participants in the criminal world, uneducated people. When creating slang words, simple terms are given a new semantic color.
So, in the slang language “to drive empty” is to lie, not to be able to answer for words and deeds, to throw promises to the wind.
What phrase “glorified” this word?
"Nothing" is a word that is especially "famous" in a particular use case. The phrase “Donbass does not drive empty” was invented back in the distant 50s, that is, this jargon is not modern. Donbass (region in the east of Ukraine) is the center of the country's coal industry. "The empty door does not drive" - that is, the cars from Donbass drove to the eyeballs loaded with coal.
In the 2000s, the phrase gained new popularity thanks to the then acting governor Viktor Yanukovych. Whatever the head of the Donetsk region may have in mind, his criminal past introduced a semantic connotation into the phrase. Indeed, in the thieves vocabulary, as you already know, “drive empty” also stands for “speak nonsense, do not answer for what was said”. Viktor Fedorovich wanted to emphasize that “specific boys” who are responsible for their words live in the Donbass, and he quite succeeded. The phrase has become an independent quote and is still in use.