I hear that happens sometimes-- from eating fallen apples that are past their prime-- but it could be BS.

Thanks for the funny-- that cookbook thing just slayed me.

And there it was!

Bother.

Also, the 300/1776 mashup was fantastic.

;)

point 6. If I mention The Gourmet Peanut Butter Cookbook Krissy will kill me.

Clearly, it was the bison's first time.

This is SPARTANBURG!

Does Making Light have an equivalent of slashdotting?

The bison picture is also on the front page of reddit.com, along with gems such as this. WARNING: before clicking the second link you should be aware that the reddit description is "Pikachu's vagina brings happiness to children" (no, it's not porn).

Rebecca @#22: B***k? Break? Bleak? Blink? ... oh, *blank*.

The worst four-letter word in England is without a doubt `work'. (insert unfair derogatory comments about the Scots, Irish, Welsh, French and everyone else not resident in North London here. ;} )

I got a lot closer on the first than on the second. At least I never tried to actually use either of the swearwords I'd made up.

I can also truthfully say that I learned the f-word from Douglas Adams, in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

(P.S. Is that actually called "elision"? I know it's not the linguistic definition but I can't think of another word.)

This is but one more reason to love the Graun (and indeed Radio 4); If they're going to use swear words they'll use them properly. I can't stand the mealy-mouthed tabloid habit of starring words out. If you're that offended, edit the quote properly - you're not fooling anyone with a few asterisks.

Just to work on the theme of 'bad words', and taking advantage of a sort of open thread, I'd like to coin a new evil: 'cleg', as in comments begging on blogs (sorry).

Could anybody direct me to information on the Senate report on the Plame affair? In particular, ISTR that some GOP Senator attached his own add-on to the report, blaming Plame and Wilson for everything, and accusing them of lying, etc. Google didn't cope well with the request, which is a sign that (a) Google is not yet omniscient, or (b) They Got to Google.

Thanks,
Barry

I always liked the one where it says to let the bread rise, and then it says that you will note that little or nothing has happened, but punch it down anyway - it's apparently a really dense dough. I haven't tried it, but his mother's recipe for raisin bread is very good. That's the one with the raisins plumped in sherry with orange peel (very happy raisins, after that!).

…what if the makers of 300 made a movie about the American Revolutionary War?

"This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Cartoon Network, Inc."

...never! What an idea! *hides enormous stockpile of Jeeves/Wooster slashfic*

There's more of it out there than you might think, actually - I know at least one cartoonist, Lucy Knisley who got C&Ded about her Wodehouse fanwork and had to take it all down from her site.

I can't say I've ever wondered any of those things.

That's really relative to the culture within which you operate, and to what's the most important within that culture. In anglophone cultures, the worst swearing seems to revolve around sex and those parts of the human anatomy involved in that activity. In France, unless you are Capitaine Haddock, it appears to be about a person's lack of intelligence. Where I come from, it's all about Catholicism.

Or, as an irate Princess Leia said to Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back...

"You... Nerf herder!"

And in Russian, it is to tell them that they have no culture.

That's certainly the worst thing an old Babba can call a young hooligan: не култуни. What one hooligan calls another, ah, that's a different story.

cleg = a horsefly, a painful biting insect (at least it does in Scotland).

Also, or so a friend once told me, referring to things dangling from one's nostrils was also a sure way to insult.

And frak is a favorite as well.

"Schmuck" is actually unspeakably rude for people in my parent's/grandparent's generations of Yiddish speakers. For them, it has the force of a term like c*nt, which is a good thing to know about before visiting one's grandmother if one has developed a tendency to sling it into one's conversation.

Not that one speaks from experience or anything....

Don't get me started on the many shades of "bastard".

Of course not. I've heard that word used so much in cop shows that I never realized how crude it was. That reminds me of a Far Side cartoon that Gary Larson's editor rejected because of his use of the word 'dork', which the ditor pointed out is a slang word for 'penis'. The things that one learns from the Far Side.

Well, after a few hours of holding up traffic in downtown Tel Aviv as he tries to control his camel, he gets stopped by the police.
"Is that your camel?"
"Er, yes."
"You sure you're handling it right?"
"I don't know."
"What sort of camel is it?"
"I don't know."
"Well, where does it come from?"
"I don't know."
"Well, do you know how old it is?"
"No."
"Well, is it a male or a female?"
"Oh, it's a male."
"How come you don't know anything else about your camel but you know that?"
"Oh, well, all day I've been hearing people say 'Look at the schmuck on that camel'."

Should I note it's not safe for work?

I'm trying to train myself out of using sexual terms as swearing, because I'm ideologically pro-sex, and using sex terms in that way sends the wrong message to my inner self. So I try not to say "fuck the GOP," but "spay the GOP" or something like that.

I never used 'smeg'. It sounds too much like a real word that means something too disgusting. 'Frell', 'frak', 'dren', all get a certain amount of use. 'Gorram' can get in there, I expect. But I wish I were able to use more of the Firefly slang; I'm just not willing to mispronounce it as abominably as the characters do, and learning to pronounce all that Mandarin is really hard.

Currently I tend to say "frotz", if I'm not really emotional, or "jesus fuck" if I am. ("Frotz" is an Infocom game in-joke, which I think I slid towards purely because it sounds *phonetically* nasty -- the "frell", "frak", "feldercarb" category -- even though in context it's innocuous.)

For a while I tried a habit of non-verbal swearing: when the computer did something particularly ireworthy, I clapped my hands as loudly as possible. This worked a lot better than you might think; it seemed to tickle the same emotional centers as screaming obscenities. (Perhaps the slam-fist-into-wall cliche has the same biophysical underpinning?)

However, people in neighboring offices objected.

Yes, reduced phoneme space does seem right. I'm thinking of the most common swear words--made up and otherwise--that I am familiar with and most of them are of the pattern CVC, where the consonants (C) can be complex. There are a few like 'bastard' which would be CVCVC, but that's just repeating the syllable structure.

Other commonalities: the consonants are usually voiceless stops--t, p, k--or voiceless fricatives--s, sh, f. The vowels are usually lax. So 'peff' sounds vaguely disparaging to my ear, where 'baiv' (rhymes with 'knive') does not. (The latter sounds like an antique verb. To me, at least.) Consider 'He's a peffing man' vs. 'He's a baiving man'.

Also, 'r' before a final stop. Puts a bit of a growl in the word... or an incentive to mutter it. As in, "You perf!" (That one is a bit too much like 'perv' to be an honest comparison, but since I started with 'peff'...)

I'm sure this is mostly trend, as opposed to rule. I can think of exceptions to all of the above... except I can't think at the moment of a swear word that ends with a vowel. (Saying 'pervy sage' is just saying the sage is a 'perv'. Doesn't count.)

Am I missing something?

It's funny to hear a three year old swearing in dead Greek.

Now I just swear too much. A few weeks ago I had made a particularly silly and embarrassing mistake, and I apologized with "I'm so f---ing sorry," only without the elision. At that point I realized I definitely swear too much, and have been deliberately cutting down since then.

The only swear I've never really avoided or elided is Goddammit. I think it may be because it doesn't have a satisfying television censored version, and because no one I knew ever got very upset at me for using it. Gorram substitutes in sometimes, but I don't think I'll ever completely stop using that one.

My favorite of the foreign language swears is the Spanish "chingate", "go f--k yourself". It's so efficient, and easy to spit out with force! But I don't tend to actually use it. I stick with either "bother" or "f--k this sh-t, you motherf--king son of a b-tch." You know, as the situation changes.

Steve @ 74: Obviously a well-educated gentleman who appreciates all the possibilities of a fully nuanced "fuck". I recommend The F Word if you want to keep up with such highbrow conversation.

I have said things in Italian that I would blush to say in English, apparently, but things happen when you are traveling alone in Italy which occasionally require strong language.

I had a comparable problem over a quarter-century ago, in another incarnation, when I had to translate a couple of Cuban poems for Caribbean Quarterly. One poem ended with the alliterative line: Carajo, compañero, corazón (ass's penis, companion [in Cuban usage, however, it is used to mean 'comrade', being preferred to 'camarada'], heart). No translation into English could hope to carry over the alliteration, and 'carajo' cannot be translated literally. In the end, I went for a compromise and translated the line 'Shit, comrade, heart'.

"You know hat? You're an ass's penis. But I mean that in a good way."

(I'm currently rereading the Lymond books. My god they're good.)

Examples:
gdmmit! I forgot my passport! (After driving two hours to the airport.)
fuk! Ahhh! I broke my finger! Ahhh!
...shiiit... Now how do I clean that up? Where that=100sq ft pool of pesticide.

This isn't the same thing as the intensifiers I use, like hell (negative), bugger (positive), etc.

I'm looking for some swearing substitutes actually, so this thread is coming in handy. (I really don't want to teach my young nephews to swear reflexively the way I do. It creates social problems for me.)

Is German swearing more elaborate and compound-wordish, or is it still close to English versions? (The only word I seem to recall is a hissy version of "shit", without the T.)

And I'm sure I've posted this in the past, but it's worth repeating: "Fuck this Article: The Yugoslav lexicon of swear words".

Germans use 'Scheisse' quite a lot, and it's socially more acceptable than 'sh*t' generally is in the US. That can lead to some awkward situations; I've known Germans who've proudly demonstrated their use of English and salted everything liberally with swear words, including f*ck and sh*t, not realizing that Americans don't really swear ALL the time in ALL situations. Maybe their impression derives from too many US films?

As Fragano noted, the sense of insults and swear words often can't be translated directly. In southern Germany, calling someone a 'Halbdackel' (literally, half a dachshund) is insulting. And one of my favorite southern German exclamations/mild swear words is "Heidenei!" It means heathenness.

I have considerable Heidenei myself.

That's interesting, because I remember a German friend of mine, when I pointed out this moderately interesting result in our field, responding with "Oh shit, you're right." It struck me as odd at the time, but I chalked it up to generic cross-language weirdness; I didn't realize there was a pattern.

#71 Laurel:

I recall my old Spanish teacher (from the Dominican Republic) telling us that coño was a pretty serious curseword, and saying "coño de su madre" to someone was a good way of getting your ass kicked. I assume this is local variation. And isn't maricon a pretty serious curseword/insult in most places, but translates as something rather harmless in a few countries?

All: I really liked Robert Jordan's set of alternative-world cursewords, which he managed to give some oomph, without ever using an English language obscenity. ("Mother's milk in a cup!")

The proper spelling of Scheiße is with the 'e' at the end (strange though it is to use proper and Scheiße in the same sentence) -- lots of usage here. However, whether the 'e' is pronounced does vary.

Heidenei -- do you mean you're heathen or Swabian? It's a great word. The meaning mostly gets conveyed through tone of voice. Very popular with moms confronting misbehaving offspring.

Totally bizarre experience: the online dictionary I used in the link above has some software that provides links related to the word you look up. Yep. Even Scheisse on eBay.

@99 albatross -- my children have spent virtually all their lives over here, and when we visit the States, I have to remind them NOT to say Scheiße etc. in front of the relatives, especially my mom. Not always so easy, because their other grandparents use it, and it just doesn't "mean" anything.

When I did something completely horrific when I was a small child, my mother would shout "Sacharaminski klook!" Literally, "sacramental boy," but 'sacramental' is used here as a euphemism-by-antonym, as are the key words in 'bless his heart', 'Fair Folk', and 'Kindly Ones'.

My favourite Eastern Caribbean imprecation, though, is the Trinidadian use of 'France' as a swear word. Annoy a Trini and you may be invited to 'go to France' or asked 'What de France you talkin' about?'

I think you could get that adopted here, at least among Republicans....

¿Que es cilíndrico, blanco, y de treinta centímetros?

Nada, ¡carajo!