• OldSoulHippie [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      26·
      19 days ago

      Everyone is just screaming into the void about their lost agency.

      I don’t know how they’re going to top the current moment. There’s a reason the top insult is “fuck you, you fucking fuck”. There isn’t a higher peak to reach

      • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        11·
        19 days ago

        There’s a reason the top insult is “fuck you, you fucking fuck”.

        See, that’s part of why English feels unserious, at least to me. I feel like the impact of insults in English are limited, like the spectrum ends at 25%, compared to other languages. You can make up for a lot of it with wit, but “you fucking fuck” is playground-level, come on. There’s a degree of unflavored spite that needs a ton of semantic scaffolding in English that can be wheeled out with very few words in Arabic.

        Insulting someone in Arabic is a poetic exercise. It’s much less clunky to just chain as many ideas as you want, invoking whatever cudgel you want to beat someone over the head with. Just let all your prejudices rip in one swift tsunami of syllables. Appearance, sect, multiple family generations, genitals, town, inadequate upbringing, God, nothing is safe. People tend to be very sensitive about respecting their religion here until it’s time to verbally slap someone, which they do by racking up a month’s worth of sacrilege. It’s fantastic. There’s also a one-word insult for women in Arabic that makes my skin crawl, that’s not a thing in English. I’m not even a woman.

        A few years back an English-language religious broadcast started up here in Lebanon and it made my fucking skin crawl. Sure they were singing the same stuff I hear in Arabic all the time, but contextually it was so different. One is something that is being intentionally chanted in an elevated form of language, the other is almost talking down to me in the same candor Barney the dinosaur did when I was four years old. I can’t explain it. It was fucking weird.

        There’s a bit of prejudice in here, I’ll admit. I don’t think I think I’m better than others based on their native language lacking emotional punchiness. But I am compelled to explain it. There are parents who never cared about their little kids saying English swear words because they practically don’t count. “Fuck you fucking fuck” is just a more petulant (and less fun to correctly capitalize) “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo”.

        • OldSoulHippie [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          3·
          19 days ago

          This is so true. One of my favorite foreign curses that I’ve heard is “I’ll make skis out of your mother’s cross”. I read it in a David sedaris book where he’s basically making the same point you are. There’s just more stank on something like that and it didn’t even have a swear word in it.

          When Americans take a stab at it, it comes out like the “fuckcrustible cromulent tommy need drinky” tweet we like to make fun of on hexbear.

          Even bri’ish people are better at it with things like “bell end”.