оттяжник

Кот оттягивается // The cat is having fun

Let’s take a short break from French, shall we?

«Митьки» (Mitki; plural of митёк mityok) are an art group formed in St. Petersburg in the 1980s. I doubt it would ever become famous if not for a book of the same name by a Russian artist Vladimir Shinkarev. (I would call the book “eponymous” if it was named after the art group; in reality, the group was named after the book.) This seminal work contains a short lexicon of the most common words and expressions of Mitki. I’ll give you two.

оттягиваться	заняться чем-либо приятным, чтобы забыть о тяготах жизни митька, чаще всего означает напиться.	to do something pleasant in order to forget the hardships of mityok’s life, typically to get drunk.
оттяжник	кто-либо, привлекший внимание митька, например, высоко прыгнувший кот.	anyone who caught the attention of a mityok, for example, a cat that jumped real high.

Now оттягиваться is a reflexive verb derived from оттягивать “to draw back”, “to pull aside”, “to weigh down”, “to delay”, “to put off” etc. which, in its turn, appears to be derived from an unprefixed verb тянуть “to pull”, “to draw ”, “to weigh”, “to delay” and so on. None of these meanings has anything to do with leisure though. So how the meaning “to do something pleasant” came about?

Well, Shinkarev provides us with a clue in the very definition: тяготы, “hardships”. Thus оттягиваться is to pull oneself away from those hardships. Sure, alcohol helps, but a jumping cat (оттяжник) also can make mityok to forget about his problems. Moreover, our cat is having fun himself, so we can unhesitatingly say «кот оттягивается».