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

[hamsterwoman]

:D! *gets your obscure Soviet film reference*

I basically agree with all of the thinky stuff you're saying, but the thing that jumped out to me was what you said about curtailing swearing in English around Godbaby, because I'm curious about a rather tangential thing:

I never swear in Russian; I know all the standard words, of course, but most of the people I speak Russian to don't swear, except when telling a dirty joke or something, and so Russian swearing is pretty taboo to me. English, on the other hand -- while I don't swear like a sailor, I definitely let slip the occasional "Fuck" or "Shit" -- with the end result that my kids knew the English swearwords (and French, 'cos that's what my husband swears in) when they went to preschool, and didn't feel much of a taboo around it either, but only picked up the Russian equivalents in their (Russian) preschool. And they could tell, by how much more I cringed when they used the Russian words, which ones were the bigger deal to me.

Sorry, that got kind of tangential, but the point of the personal story time was that I'm curious whether, between your three languages, swearwords "feel" the same to you, or different.

Meanwhile, my ten-year-old princess has devised a universal "up yours" sign, combining the middle finger (left hand) and Russian figa (right hand) with European elbow thing while holding the other two signs. It looks like some kind of weird Tai Chi move, strangely graceful, actually, and I had a hard time even pretending unconvincingly to be disapproving rather than impressed.

[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 love that it usually doesn't require a hell of a lot of verbal context to make it clear which meaning is in play.

Hungarian swearing, I can take or leave -- most of it is about the devil or the target's mother's vajayjay, bo-ring. >.> 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 (much more prominently than other things, that is). There are a few delightful expressions, but mostly I tend not to swear in Hungarian at all, since being where I am now, I am usually talking to people older than me whom I don't know very well, and that would be very rude.

[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.

Randomly apropos of your preamble to this post, I was just trying to explain Respublika SHKID to someone on LJ the other day. (It's one of those books I grew up with that I would love to share with my kids, but I don't know if it can bridge the culture gap...)

[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.