Russkij mat

[Misha Schutt]

Yoshimasa Tsuji writes:

> Incidentally, the Japanese language has neither swear words nor
>obscene words ....
> My old teacher of English who was born and brought up in Australia
>never believed this. Do you?

No, to be honest, I don't.  I'd be astonished to find any urbanized culture
in which there were no words which, e.g., a rebellious teenager could use to
shock a "proper lady," and in which there were no euphemisms to talk
obliquely about sex or bodily functions.  Words have emotional force, and
words relating to emotionally laden issues such as orgasm, excretion, or
death (e.g. the substitution of the native Japanese number 'yon' for 'shi' in
the sequence of borrowed Chinese numerals) get euphemized one way or another.

When I was in college, I ran across Mozart's "dirty canons," one of which he
wrote for a piano student he despised and ends with "O lick my ass clean!"  I
quoted this to my mother, a native speaker of German, and she herself was
surprised at her shudder on hearing these words--after 30 years in an
English-speaking country, the words in her native language held considerably
more punch than the corresponding English ones (which, at least according to
her, are much more heavily used in the U.S. than in Germany).

Oh yes, my other funny story--once I was talking to a young Chinese woman
(Taiwan) who said there were no "bad words" in Chinese.  I didn't remember
how to say the word for "fuck" but I remembered the character, a compound of
"enter" and "flesh", and I wrote it and showed it to her.  She said with a
visible shudder, "What's that character? I've never seen that word before!
Take it away!"


Incidentally, when I was in college (Middlebury 1968-72), there was in
circulation a samizdat vocabulary of words needed to read Archipelag GuLAG
which would not be found in standard Russian dictionaries--primarily, of
course, obscenities.  I never had a copy myself--is this still floating
around, and probably by now available on the net?

Samizdat--the original shareware!

Misha Schutt
Librarian, Burbank (Calif.) Public Library