Yes, it’s literally just the word fucking spelled in the Hebrew alphabet: fe-alef-qof-yod-nun-gimel. Because the great trouble of bringing a liturgical language back from the dead as a vernacular, despite the conventions of your religion saying you really shouldn’t… Is that you don’t really end up with many vulgarities to work with. Thus Modern Hebrew vulgarity as far as I’m aware primarily consists of loanwords from Arabic, Yiddish, and more recently English; or using normal words as euphemisms, probably influenced by the settlers’ first languages; or otherwise taking the handful of even remotely vulgar words of Biblical Hebrew and stretching them thin. So Modern Hebrew vulgarity feels about as LARPy to me as Esperanto vulgarity, because that’s basically what Modern Hebrew is: a constructed language.
Really, though, the even greater trouble is that anti-colonial language revitalization efforts will inevitably run into the exact same problem of being absolutely barren of obscenities. Like if you’ve listened to the Irish-language rap song “C.E.A.R.T.A” by Kneecap you might’ve noticed that they drop the F-bomb in English several times, on top of using other English-language vulgarities in an otherwise Irish-language song. It’s kinda sad to me, but it doesn’t feel as LARPy to me as Modern Hebrew’s use of English-language vulgarities — almost like the revival of Hebrew happened in a radically different sociopolitical context than the ongoing revival of Irish! Not to mention that Irish has never completely died.
I can also only judge Modern Hebrew so much for saying “fucking” when basically the exact same thing happened in Norwegian, a language abounding in its own homegrown vulgarities, which has at no point been even close to dead. Like I still roll my eyes whenever people say “føkk” or “føkkings” here, because I find it kinda cringey for people to use foreign vulgarities like that (said as if I don’t sometimes use L2 vulgarities myself)… But it still happens whether I like it or not, because English is apparently just that powerful.
R. Yaakov Shapiro authored a book titled The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s journey from identity crisis to identity theft, which, as you can guess, is about the settlers inventing ‘Israeli culture’ by means of cultural appropriation. The cultures that foreign Jews brought with them have never blended with the others, which is why nobody continues to argue that the ‘State of Israel’ is a ‘melting pot’.
Yes, it’s literally just the word fucking spelled in the Hebrew alphabet: fe-alef-qof-yod-nun-gimel. Because the great trouble of bringing a liturgical language back from the dead as a vernacular, despite the conventions of your religion saying you really shouldn’t… Is that you don’t really end up with many vulgarities to work with. Thus Modern Hebrew vulgarity as far as I’m aware primarily consists of loanwords from Arabic, Yiddish, and more recently English; or using normal words as euphemisms, probably influenced by the settlers’ first languages; or otherwise taking the handful of even remotely vulgar words of Biblical Hebrew and stretching them thin. So Modern Hebrew vulgarity feels about as LARPy to me as Esperanto vulgarity, because that’s basically what Modern Hebrew is: a constructed language.
Really, though, the even greater trouble is that anti-colonial language revitalization efforts will inevitably run into the exact same problem of being absolutely barren of obscenities. Like if you’ve listened to the Irish-language rap song “C.E.A.R.T.A” by Kneecap you might’ve noticed that they drop the F-bomb in English several times, on top of using other English-language vulgarities in an otherwise Irish-language song. It’s kinda sad to me, but it doesn’t feel as LARPy to me as Modern Hebrew’s use of English-language vulgarities — almost like the revival of Hebrew happened in a radically different sociopolitical context than the ongoing revival of Irish! Not to mention that Irish has never completely died.
I can also only judge Modern Hebrew so much for saying “fucking” when basically the exact same thing happened in Norwegian, a language abounding in its own homegrown vulgarities, which has at no point been even close to dead. Like I still roll my eyes whenever people say “føkk” or “føkkings” here, because I find it kinda cringey for people to use foreign vulgarities like that (said as if I don’t sometimes use L2 vulgarities myself)… But it still happens whether I like it or not, because English is apparently just that powerful.
R. Yaakov Shapiro authored a book titled The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s journey from identity crisis to identity theft, which, as you can guess, is about the settlers inventing ‘Israeli culture’ by means of cultural appropriation. The cultures that foreign Jews brought with them have never blended with the others, which is why nobody continues to argue that the ‘State of Israel’ is a ‘melting pot’.
Very interesting, I’ll have to see if I can get my hands on it.
Hideo Kojima approved rant