Filthy English, page 28
One of the nastiest Chinese insults is ‘turtle’ or ‘turtle’s egg’ – wangba dan. In 1944, President Roosevelt appointed Patrick J. Hurley (lawyer, former Secretary of War, Republican politician, fierce anti-communist) as the US ambassador to China and personal envoy to the anti-communist general Chiang Kai-shek. Wangba dan is what Hurley heard the communist leader Mao Zedong call Chiang Kai-shek. And what Hurley took to calling Mao Zedong.
Turtle? Turtle’s egg? Turtle can have four meanings in Chinese. It can mean, literally, a turtle. The other three are figurative: that you have a turtle’s longevity; that you move as slowly as a turtle; that you are a pimp or male brothel-cleaner. In Chinese culture, turtles are as linked with sexual misbehaviour as horns are in Italian. In Chinese social rankings, pimps come even lower than whores. A pimp or brothel-cleaner has sex with the whores – who also, given their profession, have sex with other men. So who – figure the Chinese – can know who is the father of a whore’s child? So a whore’s child is called a wangba dan – a turtle’s egg. Meaning: you bastard. In Chinese social rankings, with its strict, traditional emphasis on the importance of family and the male line, this places you beyond society. Even today.
So what’s the issue with turtles? Well, one view is that it’s because the Chinese believed that turtles themselves are promiscuous. Another theory is that wangba sounds like another Chinese word that translates as ‘forgetting the eight (or eighth)’. Good men obey the eight principles of Chinese morality: filial piety, fraternal duty, loyalty, credibility, propriety, justice, honesty, and – the eighth of them – honour. Bad men don’t obey them. In particular, those who fail to live up to the eighth are seen as dishonourable. ‘And, in Chinese culture, of course,’ a Taiwanese psychiatrist told me, ‘the son of that man is worse than the worst father. In traditional Chinese culture, family is more important than the individual.’ A common threat is: you can insult me but you cannot insult my family.
In January 2009, another aspect of Chinese culture’s relationship to swearing emerged. A short film popped up on a Chinese-language YouTube page. It was a children’s song about a mythical animal, the grass-mud horse. That was it, a not very interesting nature clip and a singalonga soundtrack. It got millions of hits. Why? It’s what passes for a public uprising in China, a way of making a clear protest about the Chinese government’s censorship of its citizens’ access to the internet. It’s spent a lot of money on constructing algorithms to prowl the net looking for sedition so blogs and chatrooms can be pulled down within minutes – which they are. Between December 2008 and mid-February 2009, nearly two thousand sites and 150 blogs were shut down. ‘The most vicious crackdown in years,’ according to the US-based online monitor, China Digital Times. It is in this context that the grass-mud horse became what Xiao Qiang of the University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with the New York Times, called ‘an icon of resistance to censorship’. Nor is it mere juvenilia. ‘The fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.’ Guo Yuhua, a sociologist at Tsinghua University described the grass-mud horse and the desert he lives in and the river crabs he fights as ‘weapons of the weak’ – from the title of a book by political scientist James Scott. So what were these weapons exactly? Well, this was the New York Times so euphemistic periphrasis took over at this point – ‘double entendres with inarguably dirty second meanings’. No more details than that, not even the Chinese originals. So I YouTubed, of course. In Chinese grass-mud horse is Cao Ni Ma – and sounds like another Chinese phrase which translates as ‘Fuck your mum’. The MaLe desert is also ‘your mother’s cunt’. The grass-mud horse’s river crab enemies? Sounds like the Chinese for ‘censorship’. The grasslands that the horse is fighting to protect? Sounds like free speech.
In Papua New Guinea, an insulting phrase for North Solomonese is as bilong sospen – saucepan’s arse. It’s a double-take. It’s a reference to a saucepan’s fire-blackened bottom – North Solomonese are darker than other Papua New Guineans. And it also indicates that the person’s arse belongs in a saucepan – a reference to the now eradicated but once prevalent local taste for having dinner not with each other but of each other.
When Catalans talk of love – or, at least, love-making – they might use the word fronto. It’s a reference to the popular local sport, pelota. It’s the name for the wall off which the ball bounces, again and again. By extension, it has become the name for the perineum, the area between vulva and anus, off which – during love-making, at least – balls bounce, again and again.
A citizen of Barcelona, wishing to suggest that someone was what a similarly angry black American would call a motherfucker, might call them a ‘Hugo Sanchez’. It’s a football analogy. Hugo Sanchez was a Mexican-born striker who played for Real Madrid, Barcelona’s great rival. He helped them win five consecutive league titles, 1986–90, scoring 207 goals, a ratio of 1.37 per game, each one celebrated with a somersault. For a Barcelona supporter, therefore, a Hugo Sanchez is about the worst thing a man could be.
Which leads to one of the most indicative of all national swears, one that captures the essence of a nation’s psychology with greater depth and far more complexity than damn or fuck ever have for us goddens and fuck-offs. When Sanchez played for his national team, the crowd would have chanted: ‘Viva Mexico! Hijos de la Chingada!’ The second phrase translates as: sons of the fucked woman. At first glance, just another variant on the Spanish hijos de puta. But there is a far richer story here.
An irate Mexican might say: chinga a tu madre. Go fuck your mother, of course. A local variant on the usual mother insults of the Spanish-speaking world. Chinga is a derivative of cingarar, a Spanish Romani word for fight. It’s usually described as the Mexican equivalent of fuck. En chinga means very quickly – an almost exact equivalent of the English velocity phrase ‘like fuck’.
But la Chingada? Here is a story of colonial conquest and miscegenation. La Chingada is the nickname of La Malinche, the indigenous mistress of Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador who invaded the Central American mainland in 1519. According to Cortés’ official contemporary biographer, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, La Malinche was a high-born Nahua from the Gulf Coast – i.e. she was what, since the early nineteenth century, has been called an Aztec. Her father died, her mother remarried. As an uncomfortable reminder of her mother’s first marriage, she was sold into slavery.
She was one of a group of twenty slave women given to Cortés in April that year, as a peace tribute from the Maya. At first, Cortés intended to hand her on to the most eminent member of his expeditionary force but he changed his mind and kept her for himself. She became his interpreter – and midnight secretary. Her linguistic and diplomatic talents eased his conquest of Mexico. She warned him about plots and planned uprisings. On 8 November 1519, Cortés and his tiny Spanish army arrived at Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire – a city on an island in Lake Tescoco which, now drained and built on, is greater Mexico City. La Malinche moved into a building at what is now 57 Higuera St, Coyoacan. Extraordinarily, this house is still there, just a little rebuilt.
La Malinche, also known by the Spanish name Doña Marina, was the translator at Cortés’ first meeting with Montezuma. After two years of violence, manoeuvring and smallpox, the Aztec empire was dissolved, on August 13, 1521. Cortés became the sole ruler of the whole of Mexico. ‘After God, we owe this conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina,’ he said. In the University of Glasgow, there is a near-contemporary image of her at a meeting with the representatives of the city of Xaltelolco. Cortés is seated, wearing a hat and pointing with his left finger. La Malinche stands by his side, bare-headed, pointing with both fingers. It looks like a fairly equal partnership.
In 1523, she gave birth to Cortés’ first son, Martín. He was the very first mestizo – as those of mixed European and indigenous ancestry came to be known first in Mexico then throughout Spain’s South American colonies. Ten years later, Cortés had a second son, by a Spanish woman. As La Malinche’s son was not of pure Spanish blood, he became the servant of his younger brother – also called Martín. From the moment he left her womb, her first-born son by her country’s conqueror was a second-class citizen in his own country. So the conquistador fucked Mexico and he fucked her. La Chingada: the fucked woman, literally and metaphorically.
La Malinche betrayed her country – or maybe, by accepting the inevitable, she prevented further bloodshed and gave the indigenous peoples a voice, even if it was only her own. La Malinche – and the national notion of fuckedness – plays a big part in the Mexican self-consciousness. To Octavio Paz, writer, diplomat, Nobel laureate, she was ‘the cruel incarnation of the feminine condition’. In The Labyrinth of Solitude, he wrote: ‘The strange permanence of Cortés and La Malinche in the Mexican’s imagination and sensibilities reveals that they are something more than historical figures: They are symbols of a secret conflict that we have still not resolved.’ In the 1980s, the Coyoacan authority erected a fountain and statue of Cortés, La Malinche and their son. There was a demonstration. The demonstrators tore the monument down.
Broadly, she is seen as an anti-Virgin Mary. Her desires are taken as Mexico’s original sin. Nations, groups, individuals – all have an origin myth. The British one centres on islandness and dates – 1066, 1815, 1940. The American one has dates, too, but also documents and speeches – Declaration of Independence, Gettysburg address, Roosevelt and Kennedy’s inauguration speeches. The Mexican origin myth focuses on a conquering man and a conquered, perhaps traitorous woman. She and their relationship are seen as symbols for everything that’s wrong with the country. Such is tragedy.
Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate and a novel about La Malinche, said in an interview: ‘In the collective subconscious, we think that she was a traitor and a whore and that he was a thief and an assassin, what does that make us?’ And again: ‘How can we ever be good if our parents were so evil? This is the type of thinking that we must change.’
Which is, when you get down to it, exactly what the terrace chanters are saying. As ‘nigger’ was reappropriated by black Americans, so poor Mexican football fans are redefining La Chingada. As los hijos de la Chingada, they are the children of the fucked, the conquistador’s native paramour’s illegitimate descendants. Laura Esquivel again: ‘It is important to revise history, to see it with different eyes and, hopefully, discover that the blood in our veins is the blood of all bloods; that our skin contains all colors; that our eyes contain all glances; that in Mexico, for the first time, the history of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America came together. If we saw things this way, wouldn’t we feel proud of our past?’ That is, only by admitting that you’re fucked can you stop being fucked.
‘Viva Mexico! Hijos de la Chingada!’ In one football chant, a nation’s history and psyche.
If Mexico has one swear which defines the national heart so Russia has a language which does much the same – a demotic and personal Russianness which sits parallel to the official and public one of Red Square and the Hermitage. There is a variant of Russian – understood, if not spoken, by nearly all Russians – which is virtually exclusively obscene. Known as mat, it’s an outsider language of sorts, a way to distinguish yourself from authority, even if only for a few words. The achingly archetypal Russian romantic Lermontov used it in his poetry. According to critic and novelist Victor Erofeyev, mat ‘is, in a way, more a philosophy of life than a subset of language’.
It’s based on just four words, all of them obscenities – khuy (penis), blyad’ (prostitute), pizda (vagina) and yebat’ (having sexual intercourse). Khuy is a descendent of its proto-Slavic ancestor, khvoya, meaning something that pricks – and which, in modern Russian, survives as the word for a pine needle. Pizda is from pisat’, to piss. Yebat’ is from bit, to hit. Blyad’ is a variant of the standard Russian word, bludnica, wandering woman.
You could also add mat itself to that quartet. Some say it’s a derivative of an old word for shout. Generally, though, it’s linked to the Russian word for mother, via the essential curse yob tvoyu mat’ – fuck your mother. (An apostrophe in a Russian word is not an apostrophe at all. It doesn’t indicate possession or that a letter is missing. Rather, it’s a ‘soft sign’, a way of indicating how letters before and after it should be pronounced – kind of like the German umlaut or the Spanish tilde, only between letters rather than above them. Many Russian words end in a soft sign, particularly infinitives. So mat: rude language. But mat’: mother.)
Because of the way the Russian language works, this tiny group of words can be played around with to create an extremely full vocabulary and an enormous range of ideas, thoughts, descriptions and injunctions. By adding prefixes and/or suffixes to a basic root word, you can turn it into a noun, a verb, an adjective – or change its sex.
Pizda, for example, can generate pizdatyi (cuntish: good), piz dyulina (the thing from the cunt: something of no consequence), pizdet’ (to cunt: to chat), pizdato (cuntly: fantastic), pizdoi nakryt’sja (cunted: broken, malfunctioning), pizd’uk (cunter: bastard), raspizdyai (a person cunting off: a slacker).
Blyad’ gives you bladki (literally, someone who is having sex with a prostitute; more generally, having sex), bladstvo (literally, prostitution; in daily use, a bad situation).
Mat can produce materit’sya (to swear) or maternye slova (swear words). Yebat’ plus affixes can whisk up s’ebat’sya (to off-fuck: to escape) and zayebat’ (to fuck someone up: to bore someone).
Khuy, often euphemized as ‘the three-letter word’ (which it is in Russian), can give you khuyeplyot, the character analysis of Hamlet first minted by the writer Venedikt Erofeyev. It translates literally as dick-plaiter – i.e. someone who just won’t stop dicking around, an amusing and accurate description of the dithering Dane. One meaning of khuy is ‘ousted Soviet diplomat’.
A talented, inventive mat-speaker can use this protean plasticity to produce whole speeches from one basic word, improvising around and with it much the way Charlie Parker could alto sax his way with and around the briefest snatch of the most clichéd show tune. Two talented, inventive mat-speakers can produce a one-note symphony. Imagine that a workman has unloaded a lorry and that the worker’s foreman didn’t want the load dealt with that way. Now imagine the resultant discussion between the worker and the foreman which takes the base word khuy and plays the changes on it, prickishly.
First in the original mat.
Foreman: Ohkuyeli? Nakhuya dohkuya khuyni nahkuyarili? Raskhuyarivay nakhuy!
Worker: Khuli? Nikhuya! Nekhuy raskhuyarivat’! Nakhuyacheno nekhuyovo! Pokhuyuarili!
Now in a regular – if loose – English translation.
Foreman: Have you gone mad? Why did you unload so much of the load? Unload it somewhere else, please!
Worker: What’s wrong with what we did? Frankly, I can’t see we did anything wrong. I can’t see any need to reload. I honestly think we did a more than adequate job. So, we’re off, I’m afraid.
And finally in a translation which gives a flavour of the original’s linguistic tenor by replacing khuy with fuck.
Foreman: Fuckwit! Why the fuck did you unfuckingload so fucking much of this fucking shit? Unfuckingload it somefuckingwhere else!
Workman: Where’s your fucking problem! No fucking way! There is no fucking need to refuckingload! It’s absofuckinglutely fine. We’re off-fucking off, right fucking now.
As the meaning of prick changes according to intonation, so do meanings in mat. According to tonal inflection (and circumstances), yob tvoyu mat’ can indicate a whole gamut of feelings from ‘I don’t believe it’ to ‘fuck off’. Polny pizdet’s can mean ‘the absolute end’ or ‘everything’s fucked’ or ‘I’m fucked up’ – among other things.
Mat has a long history. It’s older than Russian itself, maybe even a half millennium older. In essence, the modern Russian language is little more than two hundred years old, at the very most. Its first father was an eighteenth-century giant of Russian thought, Mikhail Lomonosov. Born the son of an Arctic fisherman, he was the leading polymath of his day. Along with a host of other achievements, he wrote a history of Russia and, in 1755, a new Russian grammar. Prior to Lomonosov, written and spoken Russian were almost completely separate entities. A seventeenth-century grammarian wrote: ‘One converses in Russian but writes in Old Church Slavonic.’ Lomonosov combined the essentials of these two languages, Old Church Slavonic and everyday spoken Russian.
Old Church Slavonic was a liturgical language rooted in Biblical Greek and developed from the Slavic dialect spoken in ninth-century Thessalonica, by, among others, the local missionary brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius – both of whom developed the Cyrillic alphabet which is used for Russian and the rest of what are known as East Slavonic languages. (I can’t help feeling sorry for St Methodius, having his name left off, probably only because his brother’s came from earlier in the alphabet.) This dialect from what is now Greece’s second city was the basis of the written Russian that Lomonosov worked with. Its closest surviving descendant is Bulgarian.
The everyday spoken Russian of Lomonosov’s time was a derivative of the language spoken in Kiev when it was the political and cultural capital of the eastern Slavic area – from the eleventh century till the city was destroyed by the Mongol hordes in 1240. At which point, the centre of power moved to Moscow, taking its daily language with it. This dialect now survives as Ukrainian. That is, modern Russian is the child of Ukrainian, not – as you might expect – the other way round.
Yet at least fifty years after Lomonosov’s linguistic revolution, the elite’s daily language was not Russian but French. Enter two nineteenth-century writers. First, Nikolai Karamzin, author of the first substantial history of Russia. He travelled extensively in western Europe and took home a new fluid writing style, based on French essayists’ and quite unlike Russian prose, which was still dominated by the stilted, archaic clunkiness of Old Slavonic. He also built up a new, modern Russian vocabulary, using the French methodology. As, for example, the French word développer (literally, unwinding) was built from dé (un-) and velopper (to wind), so Karamzin created the modern Russian equivalent razvitiye from raz-(un-) and vit’ (to wind)
