Filthy English, page 27
Shit! Piss! Fuck! That’s swearing.
Excrete! Urinate! Copulate! That’s not.
Is this what was behind my friend Isabelle’s decision to swear at her father in English rather than their mutual first language? Was it simply that English is better for swearing? Possibly. That, given the bilingual choice, even French-speakers prefer to swear in English? Probably. Bilinguals regularly switch languages to indicate formality of speech – the way us mere monolinguals do with tone and word choice. English-speaking South Africans use Afrikaans swears – kak for shit and doos (box) for cunt. When Balkan gypsies want to swear at God without bringing his wrath down on themselves, they take care to do it in a foreign language, Serbian – jebem vam boga! (I fuck your God.) Whose God are they cursing, then? The gypsy one or the Serbian one? Maybe they think their God doesn’t speak Serbian. Maybe they think they can trick their God into thinking that he’s being cursed by a Serbian rather than a gypsy.†
It’s not always a straightforward equation, though. My friend Agata is a Polish artist who went to an elite school in Warsaw, studied in France and now lives, studies and works in London. ‘English is my adopted language, the one I use most of the time for almost five years now.’ French is the language of her artwork. ‘I use French, English or Polish swear words depending on what I want or what I am identifying with (consciously and unconsciously). It’s a way of choosing where I belong, of how I connect, as a way of describing myself at that moment. Polish swear words feel stronger to me because I believe I might feel them as a child or a teenager would. Basically, Polish swearing didn’t grow up with me.’ This is usual. Studies find that, measured by autonomic skin response (i.e. sweating), bilinguals react more to hearing swears in their first than their second language.
In Isabelle’s case, there was also something about the fact that it was her father she was swearing at. I’m sure that, grown-up as she is, she felt that swearing at him in his native language transgressed the unstated rules that govern father–daughter relationships. I suspect that, for her, swearing in English made her curse both stronger and weaker, safer and more dangerous. By swearing in English, she gave herself the chance to be really quite rude to her father while still not overchallenging the traditional father–daughter hierarchy – which, even now, she feels, is more marked in French than Anglophone culture. In all Latin cultures, in fact. If anything, the French are probably the most open-minded – and least Catholic – of them.
So perhaps Isabelle was distancing herself in that kind of way: outsourcing her emotions, dumping unpleasant thoughts and feelings into a foreign language. It’s certainly a way of denying accountability. Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: ‘Fornication – but that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead.’ Another country, another pun.
But then sex is often something done by other countries rather than by us – in our own view of it anyway. Particularly when that sex is not-straightforward sex and particularly when that country is handily nearby – next-door usually. A German condom is a Pariser – a Parisian. When an Italian wants to discuss what in English English is called a tit-wank, he talks about una spagnola, a Spanish thing. If it’s a Spaniard talking about sex between a woman’s breasts, it’s una cubana – a Cuban thing. To an American, it’s a Dutch fuck. (To the French, it’s a cravate de notaire – very not sexy, it means a solicitor’s tie.) To Catalans, a blow-job is a frances – a French. (To the English, too.) To Italians, it’s l’arte bolognese – a speciality of the women of Bologna. To Bolognese, the person doing it is un bofilo – from Bofill, a brand of cigarette holders.
There’s a particularly long and rich Anglo-French history of this kind of thing. French letter, capote anglaise: the same thing. (Capote is the French word for what in English is a capuchin, the hooded cape worn by Franciscan monks.†) Serge Gainsbourg wrote a song about French letters (of course) for his English girlfriend Jane Birkin (of course), ‘Les Capotes Anglaises’, 1973. The French phrase makes sense – it is a kind of hood or cap. The English one doesn’t, though. What’s correspondence got to do with contraception? English is not Georgian, in which one slangonym for sex is ‘write’. Some suggest that a French letter has nothing to do with the Royal Mail. Rather, that ‘letter’ comes from let, not in the modern sense of ‘allow’ but as in ‘without let or hindrance’ – or ‘let’ in tennis which refers to the ball being caught by the net. Ultimately, both these two words derive from the Old English verb, letten, to hinder.
And there is condom: a medical-ish English word that shares its name with a small town in south-west France. There is, perhaps inevitably, an Anglo-French disagreement about the condom’s lexical parentage. The English perspective is that the name of the town and the name of the contraceptive are false friends – sonically and visually identical but historically and etymologically unlinked, like, say, bear (animal) and bear (carry). The OED, which didn’t include condom till its 1972 revision: ‘Origin unknown; no 18th-cent. physician named Condom or Conton has been traced though a doctor so named is often said to be the inventor of the sheath.’ In fact, this Dr Condom seems to have been a fiction invented, in 1817, by Swediaur Francois Xavier, a Paris-based German physician and expert in venereal diseases. Not that any of this restrained the town of Condom from opening its Musée du Préservatif, a museum of birth-control devices. This institution offers two other explanations, one etymological and one historical. The etymological one looks back to the Latin word condere, meaning hide or protect. The historical one sees a link to the slaughterhousemen of Condom who had the idea of using animal intestines as contraceptives – or, more likely, disease barriers.
Though the French did, for a while, also use the word condom, their original slang was redingote d’Angleterre. It was what Casanova called them. It translates as ‘overcoat of England’ – ‘redingote’ is simply the English ‘riding coat’ pronounced in a stage-farce French accent. It’s also tempting to wonder if there is a sexual reference in the idea of a riding coat. As a word for having sex, ride predates fuck by several centuries.
The English, basically, have just about always blamed the French for sexual infections. Frenchman: syphilis. French pig: a venereal bubo. Frenchified: venereally infected, ‘esp with syphilis’, according to Partridge’s Historical Dictionary of Slang. Also: Frenche pox (1503), French marbles (1592), French disease (1598), French Moale (1607), french-measles (1612), french cannibal (1614), French aches (1664), French Goods (1678), French Complement (1688), French Gout (1700), French-pox (1740). This was, naturally, far from being an exclusively Anglo-French thing. When syphilis arrived in Europe, everyone blamed everyone else. To the French, it was the Neapolitan disease. To the Italians, it was Spanish – or French. (In his history of swearing, Geoffrey Hughes links its seeming rise during the Renaissance with the contemporary arrival of venereal diseases.)
Pardon my French but I’ll keep going. French knickers (culottes flotantes, floating arsers). French ticklers. French courtesy: receiving a guest while on the loo. As done by French lords, but only to favoured courtiers, so considered a special honour – though clearly not from an English-language perspective.
French: oral sex. Perhaps shortened from French tricks, it’s seemingly a newcomer in the lexicon of English love. The oldest entry in the OED is 1958. But it’s also said that it dates back to the First World War when battle-weary Tommies couldn’t believe what a few francs could buy you in a French brothel. That other kind of oral-sexual insertion, the French kiss†, also dates from the same period. Quite possibly, Tommy also returned with some French prints or postcards (cartes américaines).
If we can’t find the right insult or swear word in our own language, we can take it from another one. In Nigeria, fuck is widely used by non-English speaking youths, learned from hip-hop records probably. As Sacré shows, though, not everyone swears the same way or about the same things. As cultures vary so does their bad language. Schweinehund (pig dog) really is, I’m assured, still one of the worst German swears. Italians feel similarly about pigs themselves. I got talking about this, over pan-fried red snapper in Bury St Edmunds, with Mariella, the woman sitting next to me at my cousin’s thirtieth wedding anniversary lunch. Mariella is an Italian-born language teacher. ‘The word porco is really, really strong, much stronger than the English “pig” – one of the strongest you may hear. We may talk about a man being un porco if we want to describe him as absolutely disgusting, dirty.’ Extensions to the basic porco include porco Giuda (Judas), porca miseria, (misery), porca puttana (whore).
Bosnians favour insulting the family: ‘I hope your children play in an electrical circuit’ or ‘I hope your mother farts at a school meeting’. Bulgarians go for piling it on: ‘Throw your breasts over your shoulders and make the sacred pilgrimage to the toilet; when you’ve finished, come back and then we’ll be able to talk properly.’ Lithuanians, like Québecers, retain a powerful sense of blasphemy. Yeso christo translates as Jesus Christ but is a whole lot stronger and ruder. Modern Greeks combine blasphemy and obscenity: gama stavros sou: I fucked your cross: i.e. I am really, really angry at you. A sexually excited Italian might describe themselves as assatanato – possessed by Satan. Scandinavians also like to invoke the devil. The Norwegians say: daeven steike: may the devil burn. Swedes have two levels of satanic swearing: fan (devil) and satan (same as fan, only worse).
Finns, though, favour more anatomical insults. An angry Finn might say haista vittu. Meaning: fuck you. Literal translation: smell cunt. Vittu is an old standard Finnish word for vagina that, over time, became obscene. A Finnish journalist wrote: ‘The charm of the word lies in its aggressive phonetic quality and its vulgarity. It is heavy low style, which takes speech for a moment to the gutter.’ I talked swearing with my Finnish contact in London, Satu. ‘My personal favourite at the moment is tissiposki,’ she told me. ‘A new word to the language, it translates literally as tit cheek and means a bit of a limp loser, a weakling. So, for instance, vitun tissiposki. That is, “cunt’s tit cheek” and so means you useless loser. My brother introduced me to it about a year ago.’† It is said that in Lapland, the favoured swear is a reference to the local fauna: äitisi nai poroja – your mother fucks reindeer.
Dutch swearing favours disease, even if simply bemoaning the climate. Bad weather in Amsterdam? That’ll be pestpokkenkankertyfusweer – i.e. plague-pox-cancer-typhus weather. A Rotterdammer wants to tell someone to fuck off? Opkankeren – i.e. cancer off. Insult a woman? Smerige kankerhoer – i.e. dirty, cancerous whore.
The Viennese word for a pain in the arse or a parasite is kretzen – scabies. Poland and the Ukraine are neighbours with little taste for each other but who share a favourite disease-based swear. Cholera! (Polish) and kholera! (Ukrainian) both translate as fuck! Both testify, too, just how recently cholera was a regular visitor to that part of the world. There’s the same word there in Yiddish, too, choleria! which rhymed with malaria, meaning ‘To hell with it!’ and, by extension, an awful woman.
When the Milan football team Inter played Napoli in the 2007/08 season, their fans taunted the southern team for their social and cultural backwardness, as ever – north Italians often refer to southerners as Africans. This time, there was more chaos than usual in the city of Naples. Corruption, incompetence and local pigheadness had created what Time magazine called Garbage Wars. The streets of Naples were paved with rubbish, some of it burning. So football fans being what they are, the Inter ultras held up banners telling their southern opposition: ‘Neapolitans have tuberculosis’ and ‘Ciao cholera sufferers’. When the disease (or the risk of it) returns, so does its use as an insult, it seems. Sections of the ground were closed for the next game. One Napoli fan was not satisfied with this, though. He felt so insulted that he launched an action against Inter, behind the pseudonym GDB. His lawyer, Raffaele Di Monda, said his client was made to feel ‘indignant and deeply hurt’. GDB won, too. A court awarded him €1500 for ‘existential damage’.
Local knowledge and experience are often used to create analogies. Take fish and seafood. In France, women have a mussel (moule). In Lombardy, a snail (lumaca). In Mexico, a cod (bacalao). In Spain, a clam (almeja). In Papua New Guinea, a crab (katu), a goldlip shell (kina) or a clam shell (kramsel). In Japan, a sea anemone (isoginchaku). In Uruguay and Argentina, a conch shell (concha)†. ‘We also have the insult la concha de la lora – the cunt of the female parrot,’ added Damian, a friend from Buenos Aires. ‘And there is ir a los bifes, to go to the steaks.’ That is, sex without foreplay. ‘Yes, I know,’ he added. ‘Argentinian culture, football, meat, macho.’
Or take fruit, vegetables and flowers. Tok Piksin speakers having sex are planting cassava (planim tapiok). German women have a prune (Pflaume), Mexican ones a little papaya (papayona). Dutch ones have a rose of flesh (vleesroos). Cuban women have papayas, too. So common a word for that thing is it that, to avoid embarrassment in the market, they refer to papayas with the – to English ears – even more salacious euphemism, la fruta bomba. Italian men have artichokes (carciofi). And Italian homosexuals are fennel bulbs (finocchio). (Nor is this national variety just sexual. Take idiots. In English, they’re turnips, in Spanish, they’re melons and in the south of France, pumpkins – courges.)
Even within the lexicon of sexuality, cultures vary in which parts of the body they choose to concentrate their thoughts and language. All kinds of South American Spanish speakers use the word pendejo. An insult unknown in English (or Spanish Spanish), it refers to the hair between the legs, both pubic and anal. It’s never a good thing to have said to you but its intensity varies greatly. In Mexico and its Spanish-speaking neighbours, pendejo is used to mean fool, an equivalent perhaps of the English English ‘silly arse’. In Argentina, it’s weaker, indicating nothing more than foolishness or childishness. ‘Or even just that the person is young,’ says Damian. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, though, pendejo is far stronger, used the way, say, an American, would use asshole. In Peru, a pendejo is a conman and a pendeja a promiscuous woman – who may also be a con-woman. And in the Philippines, a pendejo is a cuckold.
One of the great books about bad language is The Anatomy of Swearing by Ashley Montagu†. In it, he claims that the Japanese and most Native Americans don’t swear. This isn’t true. It seems that Japanese were, by and large, unkeen to divulge their dirty words to foreigners. As, by and large, they are unkeen to divulge many other things about their culture to foreigners. Again, as with Sacré, it’s a cultural affair, making it extremely hard if not impossible for a non-native to swear freely and accurately. A friend of mine, Spike, a Welsh-speaking minister’s son, is married to a Japanese woman. He knows a good number of dirty Japanese words but is still far from clear what is a dirty word and what is not. ‘More particularly when I can use them and when I can’t,’ he said. ‘There is not just one Japanese language really, but many different ones. Men use words that women wouldn’t use, for example. I’m used to it from Welsh where there’s a formal version of the language but a different one for when you’re talking to a child, a dog or a peer.’ A Japanese example. ‘I learned the word he from my wife. It means fart. Then I used it in front of my mother-in-law.’ She didn’t say anything to Spike but did mention it later, in private, to her daughter. Not, as an English mother-in-law might, to complain that he’d talked about farting but to share her amusement about her son-in-law’s lexical error. ‘Suffice it to say, I amuse them greatly,’ said Spike. ‘Fortunately, most Japanese, and my parents-in-law in particular, are very forgiving.’
As to Native Americans, consider the Menominee, a central Algonquin tribe. The word Eskimo came to us from their language. Aske is their word for raw. The reference is to their northern neighbours’ taste for eating uncooked meat. A favourite ‘coarse jest’ in Menominee is mana: skene: qsewew – he is losing the skin of his testicles. This Menominee swear comes to us from Reinhold Aman, a man who has dedicated his life to collecting, collating, annotating and exploring bad language. Since 1965, he has been editor and publisher of Maledicta, ‘a scholarly journal dedicated entirely to the study of offensive language’†. Aman wrote this: ‘Knowing what little I do about Menominee culture, I could guess that if one man really wanted to insult another, he might say something like “he talks to his mother-in-law”.’ Some Australian aborigine cultures famously have mother-in-law languages – complete separate lexicons which sons-in-laws will use in their presence and nowhere else.
Swears very often offer insight into the deep recesses of cultures. Some are like fossils, imprints left by sometimes long-forgotten stories. When Hungarians gather, they might say to each other ‘lo’fasz a seggedbe’. They might mean it lightly, humorously. They might not. It translates as something like ‘may a horse’s penis make its way into your anus’. Exactly the kind of thing people like to say, joshingly, to each other. In fact, it’s not the original phrase but a modern, sexualized version of it. Once, it was ‘lopat a seggedbe’ – ‘may a wooden stake make its way into your anus’. At least as painful but not sexual. It referred to the method of execution and torture favoured by the Ottomans – who occupied Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When the Ottomans left, they took their language with them. Hungarians continued using the phrase but, forgetting what the Turkish word lopat meant, replaced it with lo’fasz, one of their own words that was similar in both sound and (unpleasant) meaning.
