Curse Words

Persons of extreme sensitivity or puritanical leanings might as well stop reading right here; others might find, as I do, each language ‘s choice of curse words and  purported profanities as revealing national characteristics of its users.

Anglo-Americans favor mostly innocuous or childish CW  (to initialize curse words henceforward) by way of a potty mouth, itself a bit of a euphemism. A big favorite in America is ”Your mother wears army boots,” about as housebroken as CW can come. I am going to focus on Hungarian and Serbian ones, both rich in gusto, compensatory for belonging too small or too highly regimented nations.

Thus the Croats, constrained by both Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Roman Catholic restraints, have come up with ludicrous terms for parts of the body, based mostly on the German Scham meaning both shame and the vagina, i.e., “stidljivost,” shamefulness, a chickenfeed CW compared to Hungarian and Serbian popular parlance. Which Croatian ones are the subject for laughter out loud by Serbs and Hungarians, going in for far saltier things.

Take, for instance, walking in the streets of Belgrade, the Serbian capital, or in the so-called korzo, the favored universal promenade, where the prolific, loud expletives  are “jebi ga,” fuck it, or “jebesh mu” fuck his (something or someone), expressions with which the parlance of even many educated speakers is laced raising almost no eyebrows. Rather more problematic is the Serbian “idi u pichku materinu,” or the Hungarian version, “menj az anyad pichajaba,” go into your mother’s cunt. ” Serbian even has a popular alternative for that organ, “pizda.” Neither form has any truck with something as infantile as pussy.

Moreover, elaboration thrives, as for example in “I fuck your mother’s black whorish cunt,” in either Serbian or Hungarian, still fairly routine stuff. But I must confess to a certain abstemiousness myself, not using any of the above, but contenting myself with much milder utterances, such as “Go to hell” or “Go to he devil,” even though I am aware that neither hell nor devil exists. This restraint despite the fact that even the highly civilized French has the tougher “va te faire foutre,” coming from that neither small nor a powerless nation. But consider that even in literature, such wildly unhampered practitioners as Rimbaud and Lautreamont made no use of expletives. Yet, as always, there are exceptions. The poet Apollinaire’s celebrated comic-pornographic work, “Les cent mille Verges” which is S&M, but turns into Vierges (rods into virgins), which is comedic sacrilege. think of Saint Ursula and her retinue.

To my eternal regret, I don’t know or read Italian, so I can’t say what obtains in that language  beyond the rather ungracious “porca Madonna,” and the totally anodyne “porco di Baccho.” For Spanish, I depend entirely on Hemingway, from whom I get “cojones,” pricks. I would be particularly interested in what gives in Scandinavian languages, as well as in other Slavic ones, of which I am ignorant. However, there is a Russian fiction by Mikhail Arcybashev, in a translated scene from which a man pays a poor young woman quite handsomely to let him whip her naked buttocks a specified  number of blows.

                                                                                                                                                      

Most writers even in, say, Hungarian, make no use of CW, not even, such as the wonderful Frigyes Karinthy or the less wonderful Peter Esterhazy. To be sure, I have neither read nor heard very recent performances in foreign languages, and cannot speak conclusively to anything but English.

                                                                                                                                                        
Even there, I have avoided such writers as Hubert Selby (“Last Exit to Brooklyn”) and note that even in most of them, as in Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, there is little or no CW. There are others, so-called Beats, typified by William Burroughs with his “Naked Lunch,” and the once ubiquitous Charles Bukowski., neither of whom I have read at all. In speech, my friends and I have remained essentially chaste. The same goes for most recent British writers.

But not so, strange to say, for the theater, as wallowingly spearheaded (if that is the word for it) by David Mamet, with any number of contemporary playwrights having made use—some more, others less—of his CW. What I find interesting is that the verb for sex and the four-letter version of excrement are profusely employed, but the grant almost never includes the sexual organs, I don’t quite know why. It may be out of some last-ditch effort at respectability that cannot be sloughed off, like the verb, which, through frequency of use has come to pass as practically inconspicuous.

Things used to be different in Restoration England, as for example in the writings of that remarkable rake and poet, Lord Rochester. In his only once performed play “Sodom,” he apostrophized the female organ brilliantly as “This is the warehouse of the world’s chief trade,/ On this soft anvil all mankind was made.” In the play, Rochester’s patron and butt, King Charles II, is satirized as saying (using the contemporary pintle for penis) “And with my pintle I shall rule the land.” More rowdily we get dear “Industrious cunt shall never pintle want,/ She shall be mistress to the elephant.” (Was that about poor dear Nell Gwynn?)

To this day, few publications are allowed to print anything like that, although The New Yorker does permit the verb for sex. I myself do not advocate unrestrained use of CW, lest it, too, lose its sting. Nudity in the theater is permitted, more often of men than of women, make of it what you will. There has also been simulated intercourse, though not the actual thing as in “Sodom.” In Germany, there was something called “Nacktballet,” from a leading female dancer-choreographer, Marie Wigman. it never crossed boundaries, although I for one wouldn’t have found it unwelcome anywhere.

And what about the future of CW? Having no crystal ball, I cannot predict it. I am , however, all for it as long as it is used judiciously  and not indiscriminately. As for my own limited, personal future, there is no telling what can prevail. I daresay that neither angels nor devils espouse nudity and uncalled-for CW.