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    The World's Worst Swear Words & Their Surprising Origins: English: The World's Swear Words, #1
    The World's Worst Swear Words & Their Surprising Origins: English: The World's Swear Words, #1
    The World's Worst Swear Words & Their Surprising Origins: English: The World's Swear Words, #1
    Ebook71 pages1 hour

    The World's Worst Swear Words & Their Surprising Origins: English: The World's Swear Words, #1

    By Brian Loo Soon Hua

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    About this ebook

    Profanity is dynamic, ever-changing, constantly shifting in form and meaning over time. We might find it unbelievable today, but during the Middle Ages "By God's bones!" and "God's truth!" were far more offensive than "c*nt", "sh*t" and piss – all three of which were mundane enough to appear in maps and other official records as part of medieval street names! "Queer" meant "peculiar". a "bitch" was simply a female dog and both men and women of all ages could be "sluttish"!

    In this series, linguist Brian Loo Soon Hua takes readers on a journey to explore the rich origins of obscenity, slurs and insults from various languages – starting with English.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrian Loo Soon Hua
    Release dateMar 7, 2020
    ISBN9781386239055
    The World's Worst Swear Words & Their Surprising Origins: English: The World's Swear Words, #1
    Author

    Brian Loo Soon Hua

    Brian Loo Soon Hua is a world traveller with a keen interest in anthropology, gastronomy and etymology. He translates and manages social media in various languages for a living, blogs about (what else?) languages and attends language conferences around the world in his spare time.

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      Book preview

      The World's Worst Swear Words & Their Surprising Origins - Brian Loo Soon Hua

      INTRODUCTION

      Let’s be honest, everyone swears. Linguistic studies from as far back as the 1980s suggest that the average person uses between eighty and ninety taboo words a day. Now, multiply this number by seven billion or so. What that means is yes, there is a lot of swearing flitting about on a daily basis. In the United States alone, a set of ten words consistently accounts for over eighty percent of public swearing. And now, thanks to our increasingly connected world with its shrinking borders and ease of communication, swear words are being shared across languages like never before.

      Bordeaux is one of my favourite cities, and whenever I’m in town I make it a point to stay at my regular AirBnB, a nineteenth-century Bordelaise house on the right bank of the River Garonne far from the hustle and bustle of historic downtown. One lovely afternoon, as I walked back towards the house along the shady riverbank piste de velo, enjoying the cool spring breeze while dodging speeding French cyclists zipping past me from all directions, I chance upon one of the neighbours, a friendly older woman who lived with her husband a few doors down the street. Madame Rousseau was standing outside, pointing excitedly at the little bus stop situated right in front of her home. Someone, most likely a neighbour’s adolescent son (we had a narrow list of possible suspects), had drawn a rude splash of garishly-coloured graffiti using marker pen on the glass panel of the bus stop. "Ben, c’est un gros mot qu’il a ecrit, non? asked an excited Madame. (Well, he’s written a bad word, hasn’t he?").

      I walked closer to inspect whatever the vandal-slash-amateur artist had left behind and sure enough, the gaudy fuchsia, neon green and bubblegum pink wash of letters rudely spelled out: FUCK

      Stunned, I asked - after performing the obligatory cheek kiss greeting known as la bise - how she, a French-speaking septagenarian could have possibly understood that word. With her typical charming shrug, she merely said, while making a sweeping all around gesture, "Ben oui, c’est un peu partout." Yes of course, it’s just about everywhere.

      What does it mean when a completely monolingual French speaker in her seventies (who eats oysters from the Bassin d’Arcachon on Sundays and buys live lampreys from the fishmonger to cook lamproie a la Bordelaise (a tasty if somewhat shockingly-prepared dish from Bordeaux) recognises and even comprehends the meaning of the English word fuck? What does it all entail? Has English profanity (along with other anglicismes, but let’s just focus on the profanity) been finally creeping into that pristine, sacred institution that is the French language? From the looks of the charmingly misspelled English-language graffiti mushrooming all over Paris and other major cities (such as the exquisitely neon yellow fuck you big mother bitche spotted by this author on the drab wall of an apartment block along the RER B train line somewhere between Charles de Gaulle Airport and Gare du Nord) the casual observer would say - very likely.

      At an international level, this increasing familiarity with English profanity is likely due to three factors. The first one is the mass media, with expletive-filled modern movies essentially reducing the shock value of swear words and even making them ‘cool’ - hence the neighbourhood graffiti artists working hard to push vulgar Anglicisms as hip art even in the heart of France. The second factor is the Internet which, having essentially broken down geographical and political borders, now allows an (almost) unrestricted and instantaneous flow of person-to-person information across the globe. The third, is the allure of the profane.

      What is profanity but a spontaneous verbal reflection of our strongest, deepest and most heightened emotions? We use profanity when we are in pain, when we are under stress, when we want to inflict emotional suffering on others and when we want to show our abject disagreement. Vulgar words are powerful on all levels; as children, we learn them differently than regular words; our brains encode them differently; we even articulate them differently - English swear words like fuck, shit, cunt, bitch etc are often monosyllabic, short and terse. They can be borrowed between different languages and they can evolve over time but the most common ones in English are ancient, originating from Germanic rather than Latin roots. Whore, fart and shit for example, are among the oldest words in the English language. And swear words in many languages all over the world are indeed old. Our Bordelais vandal is only one in a long line of

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