The Grammar of Swearing
If you’re a word/grammar pedant like me, then you’ll love English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects, perhaps the best guide to the grammar of swearing written to date.
A smart person spent a lot of time on this, which I applaud.
Teaser:
Consideration of these examples makes it fairly clear that the fuck of (12a)-(20a) (henceforth fuck1) and the fuck of (2) (henceforth fuck2) are two distinct homophonous lexical items. These two lexical items have totally different selectional restrictions, as is shown by the examples:
(26) Fuck these irregular verbs.
(27) *John fucked these irregular verbs.
(28) Fuck communism.
(29) *John fucked communism.
There’s more where that came from from where that came.
[via kottke.org]
Technorati Tags: swearing, grammar, humor, fun
While completing my undergraduate degrees in linguistics and french I wrote an anthropolinguistics paper comparing swearing (on the levels of syntax, pragmatics, and the lexicon) in European and Québecois French. As an example I used that famous string uttered by The Merovingian from The Matrix « Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards enculés dans ta mère » in my presentation of the paper.
The paper, unbelievably, has since been cited three times !
(And yes, it was free from the amateurish writing mistakes that appear in the above comment *blush*)
Cool! Both the piece and the comment by Sanford.
I’m a grammar/English language nerd myself, so this stuff is inherently interesting to me.
Anyway, I have nothing else to say so I propose—correctly, natch—to end this here.
Michael — that is kickass. What does that French phrase mean?
This style of French swearing is a string of expletives usually used to express a profound sense of general discontentment, like one might expect from someone who has just been rear-ended while sitting at a red light.
Difficult to translate because of the intervening prepositions which become meaningless in English (de = of), literally it means “For God’s sake (in the name of God), (of) slut, (of) brothel, (of) shit, (of) sluts (=very stupid things), (of) idiots shoved in your mother’s ass”.
Un con = a (male) idiot, une salope = (female) slut, though connerie/saloperie usually refers to something stupid that’s happened.
Even being a translator, I’ll admit that translating swearing is especially difficult; without context, as above, it’s nearly impossible.
michael — hoo boy. So let me see if I have this straight.
Your French phrase means, loosely translated, “For God’s sake, slutty brothels of shit and sluts and idiots shoved in your mother’s ass.”
I probably took some creative license there, but damn, that’s fantastic. I want to actually say this to someone one day.
The more I read it, the more I like it. Even if I totally borked the translation…oh well. It has legs!
Yooou got it! (though it’s Larry and Andy Wachowski’s phrase, not mine).
While unnaturally long, that’s a relatively standard construction if cut in half. In France swearing is mostly sex-based, in Canada it’s almost entirely church-based. The two most common swear words in Canadian (Québecois moreover) are tabernacle and host (bread given at communion for those of you who aren’t familiar with it).
I imagine how odd that must sound to a foreigner : « oh host of the tabernacle ! » at dropping your peanut-buttered toast on the dog bed.
Sanford — off-topic, but when are you going to get your site finished?