Bad words

[A. Maberry]

On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, James A. Landau wrote:
>
> Yiddish and German are mutually comprehensible languages, yet they are spoken
> by people of different cultures.  This, it appears to me, is reflected in
> their respective vocabularies of bad words.  As was pointed out on this list,
> "hmooze" is a bad word in German but not in Yiddish.  "Shmuck" (which has
> both meanings of English "prick") is a bad word in Yiddish.  What about in
> German?

Schmuse is somewhat negative in German but I might not characterize it as
"bad". The dictionary at my desk (Cassell's) has "flatter, soft-soap (a
person) gossip, chatter, talk-nonsense". "Schmuck" in German is "ornament,
jewels, decoration,", etc. My dictionary doesn't list any meaning which
would be similar to Yiddish "shmuck".
>
> In fact we have here one-language-two-cultures, as opposed to English's
> two-languages-one-culture.  This should make German/Yiddish a good test bed
> for investigating why bad words are bad.

Of course, there are a number of Yiddishists who consider German and
Yiddish to be two separate languages.
This reminds me of a joke/story I heard once and only remember the
outlines. There is an old Russian/Ukrainian Jew who happens to be in
Germany and he is robbed or something and is taken before an official who
claims he can understand Yiddish because it's the same as German. The old
man describes what happened in Yiddish but uses an extremely high
percentage of Slavic loanwords and expressions and the official, of course
can't understand him at all. The punch line is the old man leaving,
complaining "What's the matter with that guy? Can't he speak German".

[If anyone knows the long version of this joke, I'd be grateful to have a
copy, which being in Yiddish, should be probably sent off list.]

> In an otherwise long-forgotten book, I ran across the following theory:
> dogs, since they eat the corpses of people slain on battlefields,  are widely
> used as a metaphor for disgust.  Hence German "schweinhund" and Arabic "dog
> of an infidel".


I don't think the Arab dislike of dogs is related to their eating corpses
on battlefields but are just among a number of unclean animals held in
disregard.

allen
maberry at u.washington.edu