my calendar says I was overdue for some tl;dr navel-gazing.

[furiosity]

So I was writing this thing about my favourite childhood books for scrtkpr, went off on a tangent, and started waxing poetic about slurs/offensive words and the defence of their use under the "free speech" umbrella. I'm actually not even sure any more how the tangent happened, because one moment, I was sitting there describing the plot and characters of «

Comments

[elizardbits]

WHY ARE YOU SO WISE ALL THE TIME SRSLY

data point: all the kids under 5 that I know (and alas there are many) swear like tiny sailors. It is probably the most interesting thing about them.

[furiosity]

I AM NOT WISE I AM ONLY LEARNING [/OBSCURE SOVIET FILM REFERENCE]

The kids you know sound like a lot more fun than the kids I know! (Except godbaby. :3)

[hamsterwoman]

:D! *gets your obscure Soviet film reference

[furiosity]

:DDD! I miss that movie. :3

ohgod I swear WAY more in Russian than I do in English. Part of it is just that my parents were so anti-swearing that my rebellious phase obviously included learning to swear like a sailor, and listening to Сектор газа (the band) fleshed out my early slang-education quite nicely. I am actually in awe of the breadth of the Russian curse-word vocabulary -- with the appropriate context, you can carry on an entire conversation in nothing but curse words and their variations and make yourself understood. Russian swear words are definitely closer to my heart than English ones, and you can get ridiculously creative with them. It pleases me that they can mean different things depending on context. E.g. "похудел, но без буквы п и буквы д" [XDDD] generally means astonishment, but it can be of any gradation between the good kind of astonishment and the bad -- but it can also mean that someone has lost all sense of propriety and is behaving impudently, or that someone has lost control of their senses [rare]. I also

[hamsterwoman]

That reminds me I need to track down a copy of that Zolushka to show the kids. Our library has tons of old cartoons and new-fangled movies, but neither Shwartz's Zolushka nor Snezhnaya Koroleva *sigh*

I totally admire the grandeur and might of Russian mat and find it far more interesting and versatile than English swearing (which is kind of bland. I mean, the really interesting expressions in English rely on non-swearwords to bring in the fun). It's just like... playing piano or something. I admire people who can do it skillfully, but it's not a discipline to which I am personally predisposed. :P

Out of the three, Hungarian swear-slang in my experience is the most misogynistic as vajayjays, mothers, and the word "bitch" figure prominently both as main curse-words and as modifiers Interesting! I do find it interesting how different languages seem to center their swearing on different concepts, since it does seem like the swear roots that are the most widely used are different

[furiosity]

I think it can bridge the culture gap. I mean, it was about a time that kids our age had absolutely no way to relate to (I mean, kids being treated essentially as adults, talking about millions of money, rations, etc -- we may have been familiar with the ideas to some extent but the world in which that book was set was in many ways like a pretend one. It's the human stories that make the book compelling, IMO, and those don't require any gap bridging.