bloodyrosemccoy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2007-04-24 01:25 pm
bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2007-04-24 01:25 pm
Entry tags:
Say The Word And Be Like Me
Library of Congress Day
National Teach Children to Save Day
Birthday - Barbra Streisand (singer, actress)
National Teach Children to Save Day
Birthday - Barbra Streisand (singer, actress)
It may have to do with the fact that I started drinking my caffeinated tea right then, but today I perked up in linguistics and gender class right as we got to swear words.
Okay, it wasn’t the caffeine. I’m just a big fan of swear words.
Now this might seem odd for a girl from the white side of Salt Lake, a city so pasty that baby turtles on coasts hundreds of miles away mistake its light for the moon and move inland, a city where one of the biggest scandals during the Olympics was when Mitt Romney said The H-Word.* Or it might seem perfectly reasonable, in a forbidden fruit sort of way—but that’s not true either, because while Utah itself might cuss like Playhouse Disney, my family is full of old pros at it,** and I do not lack experience.
The thing is, I just find every aspect of swearing cool.
You can learn a lot about a culture by what it considers Taboo Language—look at the Victorian fears of the word “pants” or “leg,” or some languages’ words for certain relatives, and one I’ve heard of where the world for “left hand” is bad but don’t quote me on that. I love making up swears for my conlangs from this principle—basing curses on certain fun aspects of the societies, such as the arhode’s distaste for getting wet resulting in “go soak yourself” being a lot more vulgar than it is in English, or the sprites’ equivalent of “son of a bitch” meaning something along the lines of “black personality.”***
The sound of swear words can be fun, too. They’re often words that get spat out, so they slur if they’re polysyllabic. “Shit” is the most evocative of its literal description for me, but “damn” and “fuck” and their various forms are more fun to say.
Profanity is neurologically interesting, as well. Such interjections are actually stored in a different part of your brain, which is why it’s so easy to access “God dammit sonuvabitch” when you bang your shin. That’s also an explanation for the more well-known (but, might I add, least common) form of Tourette’s syndrome, when the tics include uncontrolled swearing or repetition of a phrase such as “you know,” and why people with various aphasias can still swear. (That’s also where you store song lyrics or poems you “know by heart,” and why after fifteen years I can still sing the entirety of “Yakko’s World.”) Once again, This Is Your Brain On Language is awesome.
I also like creative swearing, like they do on Firefly, which doesn’t seem like something you store but that you have time to think about. Favorites from that show include (translated from Mandarin), “Holy mother of god and all her wacky nephews!” and “Explosive diarrhea of an elephant!” It’s nasty, but funny.
And, of course, there’s the naughty rebellious feeling you get when you do swear. Street cred. Acceptable badness. It’s fun to play with the taboo. Even telling people that swearing is interesting sounds slightly rebellious, and you’re delighted with that.
I am, anyway. “Damn,” I seemed to be saying in class, “this shit is fanfuckintastic.”
*I am not making this Olympic scandal up.
**Slam. “God dammit sonuvabitch!” “Hey, everybody, Dad’s home!”
***The actual phrase is “Fulo vetuk!” If you think you know why that’s a joke, then present yourself to Ian McKellen for your prize. If you know why that’s a joke, then there is no hope for you.
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That swearing/lyrics/poetry are stored in a different part of your brain is really interesting. I hadn't known that. My lyrical memory is great, the other, not so much. Perhaps this means I have vast untapped reserves of swearing potential...or perhaps it means it's allready full of lyrics and poems.
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Hey, I think it's cool!
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I too adore creative swearing, and words that sound like swears but aren't (I've found that "kelp", pronounced with sufficient ferocity, tends to convince people I've just cussed in some other language). I also use "Dlarg garn it!" as my own personal version of "Gorram it!"-- a reference dating back to a philosophy class that assigned us to invent our own religions.
*laughs* people are often shocked when I curse, because I look so "sweet and innocent". When I'm pissed, like today, I have a mouth like a sailor. I think my coworkers found me quite entertaining today... among other outbursts, I called the office computer a "goddamn son of a motherfucking bitch"... technically nonsensible, of course, but it rolled off the tongue nicely, especially after the second time the damn thing crashed :)
Again, thanks for the post. Keep us updated on the world of invective.
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One of my professors once told a mostly bilingual classroom that, if they were ever confused about what their primary language was, they should ask someone to hit them on the toe with a hammer, and whatever language they cursed in at that moment was their true native tongue - which had me all confused, because I sometimes swear in Dutch at such times, a language I can barely speak. Perhaps the fact that my father often swears in Dutch had something to do with it.
My own love of creative swearing goes back to reading Tintin comics (more and more, I'm realizing how many of my traits can be traced back to that series), in which Captain Haddock swears constantly, without actually uttering a single bad word in 23 volumes (although I've always had trouble with the direction the English translation took it).
I know insults are conceptually different from swears, but one of my favourite creative insults is "oyster buttock" (again, sounds better in French - "fesse d'huître"), because... well, you can't get much more inextistant than that.
I remember I was still learning English when I heard my first "fuck you" (given that I lived in NYC at the time, I'm surprised it took me over a year to come across it). I asked my father what it meant and, even though French and Dutch curses were by no means taboo in our household (see above), he was all vague and evasive about it, and merely said it was rude - so, of course, I had to try it out for myself. It's unfortunate that I tried it out on my mother - but then again, I had no idea it was that rude.
Sorry, your post seems to have set me into "anecdote mode"...
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I'd be interested in Captain Haddock's swears. One of my favorite weird swears is Sarge from Red vs. Blue's "What in buttery goodness?" They actually do swear a lot, but they make up goofy stuff like that, too, too.
Captain Haddock
Re: Captain Haddock
Still sounds weird to me in English. I grew up reading the French version, and even though I'm a translator, I can't imagine what the English translation sounds like to a native anglophone. It invariably sounds... prissy to me, whereas the original phonetically evokes actual swears.
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Sameri'i directly translates as "mud lizard"; the species is a highly poisonous lizard that, if it bites you, you are most likely going to die. The word alone translates as "bitch" or "bastard" as a curse; the phrase Jio/jia e'e sameri'i is "son/daughter of a 'bitch'" and the phrase waiahilinachi sameri'i (which literally translates to "bitten by a sameri'i" and is more said that way as quickness instead of grammatical properness) is a cultural equivalent of "You're fucked."
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