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walburgablack replied to your post “more chronicles of dude’s coworker: the man, we’ll call him J, has…”
that is *delightful*. one of my friends on-purpose learns the dirty bits of every language she can and only then starts acquiring the crucial vocabulary, so I get to be on the other end of this experience a bunch.
That sounds fantastic. I would only get into terrible trouble with this sort of thing.
I honestly don’t know how to swear in any languages besides English. I learned Spanish in school, and from my mother, and my mother learned it in school, so her Spanish is fluent but… lacking. She was aware of this, and asked a Spanish exchange student for pointers, and the girl innocently gave her a list that she then cross-checked with another native speaker (an older Puerto Rican woman, I think), and the second person was like “jesus christ those are filthy you can’t say any of that to anybody burn this paper immediately”, and some of that is that I believe Spaniards have exceptionally filthy mouths (i say this without judgement as a simple statement of fact ok), but a lot of it is that knowing what’s an Unforgivable Swear is sort of… contextual.
Anyway. Dude’s coworker J grew up among Puerto Ricans and so knew a few words, and especially knew which words were fighting words to be avoided, and it turns out Costa Ricans don’t have exactly the same boundaries; his wife off-handedly called her son one of the words he’d been taught Never To Say Unless You Want To Probably Die, and he about had a heart attack.
But the only time Dude has ever been to the UK, a friend casually called her mother, to her face, a “fucking cunt” over a minor difference of opinion, and he physically recoiled into a wall in visceral cringing horror, and the mother hadn’t really even noticed and they were both like “what just happened to you” as he tried to collect himself, so this is clearly true across languages.
(Your picture was not posted)
walburgablack replied to your post “more chronicles of dude’s coworker: the man, we’ll call him J, has…”
that is *delightful*. one of my friends on-purpose learns the dirty bits of every language she can and only then starts acquiring the crucial vocabulary, so I get to be on the other end of this experience a bunch.
That sounds fantastic. I would only get into terrible trouble with this sort of thing.
I honestly don’t know how to swear in any languages besides English. I learned Spanish in school, and from my mother, and my mother learned it in school, so her Spanish is fluent but… lacking. She was aware of this, and asked a Spanish exchange student for pointers, and the girl innocently gave her a list that she then cross-checked with another native speaker (an older Puerto Rican woman, I think), and the second person was like “jesus christ those are filthy you can’t say any of that to anybody burn this paper immediately”, and some of that is that I believe Spaniards have exceptionally filthy mouths (i say this without judgement as a simple statement of fact ok), but a lot of it is that knowing what’s an Unforgivable Swear is sort of… contextual.
Anyway. Dude’s coworker J grew up among Puerto Ricans and so knew a few words, and especially knew which words were fighting words to be avoided, and it turns out Costa Ricans don’t have exactly the same boundaries; his wife off-handedly called her son one of the words he’d been taught Never To Say Unless You Want To Probably Die, and he about had a heart attack.
But the only time Dude has ever been to the UK, a friend casually called her mother, to her face, a “fucking cunt” over a minor difference of opinion, and he physically recoiled into a wall in visceral cringing horror, and the mother hadn’t really even noticed and they were both like “what just happened to you” as he tried to collect himself, so this is clearly true across languages.
(Your picture was not posted)
