by Emma Byrne
A female senior high school EFL student asked me about “bad words” in her weekly diary. She needed to understand what these words were used for, and why many American actors used them in movies. She inquired if it was acceptable for her to use them as well. My immediate knee-jerk reaction was to discourage their use and to advise her not to discuss or think about taboo language . . . [H]ow uninformative that was, especially for a language learning student! So, via diary writing, we discussed what swear words were, and how problematic their use can be, even among native speakers. This student had legitimate questions about a part of English that exists but, unfortunately, is little spoken of in teaching contexts.
But, because swearing is such an important and powerful part of language, can we really say that we can speak a language until we can swear in it? While many people are careful about when and why they swear, anyone who lives in a country for any length of time is going to be exposed to that country’s version of swearing, whether because they encounter anger and aggression or—more likely—because they want to be part of a group that shares an identity based on the kind of jocular abuse common among friends and colleagues. If we don’t help students to learn the social rules of swearing, we’re leaving them at a cultural disadvantage.
For me, it was the experience of films, football, and friends that taught me about swearing in French. Despite a first degree where I was not only taught French, but also spent a lot of time being taught in French, I didn’t encounter the language in anything other than an educational or business context until I went out and began socializing with French people.
But maybe that’s no bad thing. Swearing is so varied between peer groups, and is so culturally laden, that formal instruction might not be the best way for swearing to be learned. After all, in our first language we learn about swearing from our family and friends, and the cultural influences that surround us. We know that our use of bad language isn’t determined solely by the language we are speaking and the country we are in. We tend to learn habits of swearing that are distinct to the social groups we belong to and the identities that we feel we have. If we receive any formal instruction about swearing at all it is usually limited to the idea that swearing is offensive and shouldn’t be used. We have to learn about swearing in the context of genuine culture.
For example, children learning a second language from their peers are usually fairly adept at picking up “dirty” or “bad” words—perhaps because their peers have such dreadful poker faces. Professor Ben Rampton of King’s College London studied children picking up Punjabi in the playground from their friends.19 He equipped children with radio microphones to study their speech. In one example David, who speaks English as a first language, is sitting with Jagdish, one of his best friends, and some other boys, all of whom speak Punjabi. David is twelve and Mohan and Jagdish are thirteen:
Jagdish asks David (in Punjabi), “Do you want to bum Laura?” and the Punjabi-speaking boys laugh.
David replies, “No, I don’t think so.”
Jagdish says, “No, I said . . . that means, ‘Are you going to beat Laura up?’”
David: “No.”
Sukhbir: “Yes it does.”
David: “No, it means, ‘Are you going to make her pregnant?’”
David doesn’t exactly know what Jagdish’s Punjabi colloquialism means—from my understanding, pregnancy doesn’t result from “bumming” someone. It’s possible that even Jagdish doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. But David is smart enough to guess from the gales of laughter from the other boys that he is being tricked and, being on the cusp of adolescence, suspects that the trick is something to do with girls and sex. He won’t believe Jagdish and Sukhbir’s translation and tries to use context and his imagination to guess what was said.
This is a very natural way of learning language, and especially of learning how to swear. Because David learned this phrase in a context where there were overtones of “dirtiness” and “taboo,” and where there was a strong emotional context of piss-taking and male bonding, it’s likely that he’ll have a far better understanding of what the phrase really means, and where it is and is not appropriate to use it, than if he had simply learned it from a book.
Pulp Friction: The Problems of Translation
One of the best ways to learn a language is to immerse yourself in its culture. This means reading the books and websites, watching the films, television, and videos, and listening to the songs that are popular in the culture you’re trying to be a part of. We acquire those little “tells” about the social group we belong to by assimilating what others do, by mimicking the kinds of swearing, jokes, slang, and references that they use.
But what happens when we need to move something from one culture to another? When those very same cultural influences that teach us how to belong to a specific group are being repackaged for another audience? That’s where the work of a translator comes in. While some words might translate directly: for example “shit” into “merde,” “sheiße,” or “mierda,” there is no guarantee that the words “mean” the same thing: the degree of offensiveness, the frequency of use, and the type of situations where the word is acceptable all differ from place to place.
The job of a translator is not simply to substitute one word for another based on what the bilingual dictionary says. This is one reason why machine translation is so challenging. Good translations preserve the sense of what’s being said, emotionally and culturally as well as semantically. And swearing presents a particular challenge to translators, partly because it’s such an emotive part of language, so preserving that emotional force really matters, but also because different cultures have such different taboos, and have very different ways of using swearing.
Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn produced a new translation of the Marquis de Sade’s 12 Days of Sodom for Penguin Classics in 2016. “We had a duty to be just as rude, crude, and revolting as Sade,” said McMorran.20 “Was a vit a prick, dick or cock? Were tétons boobs, tits or breasts? Was a derrière a behind, backside, or indeed a derrière?” In the end they chose to use current sexual slang terms, as long as they didn’t sound jarringly contemporary.
But there is more to translating profanity than just choosing le mot juste. Cross-cultural studies of English and Spanish swearing show that English speakers tend to stick to a few well-established swearing phrases whereas Spanish speakers tend to be far more inventive in the swearing that they use. For example, the translators of Pulp Fiction into Spanish had to work hard to translate all of the instances of “fuck” in the script. Pulp Fiction’s script clocks in at 1.74 fucks-per-minute. For context, Scarface manages a mere 1.21 fpm, while Hot Tub Time Machine racks up 2.12 fpm. About one-sixtieth of the running time of Pulp Fiction is made up of swearing and the majority of that swearing uses “fuck” in some sense. That’s a significant chunk of the film that’s made up of f-words and yet it doesn’t get monotonous. That’s because, in English, “fuck” can be used as a verb (“Fuck you”), adjective (“It’s fucked”), noun (“I don’t give a fuck”), and either literally (“We fucked”), figuratively (“Don’t fuck with me”), or as an interjection on its own (“FUCK!”)
In Spanish, however, there is no single word that can form such feats of lexical gymnastics. The translator had to inject a much wider variety of vocabulary into the script. Dr. Ana Maria Fernández Dobao from the University of Montreal made an in-depth analysis of the numerous ways in which the translators had to come up with a whole range of swearing when they prepared the film for the Spanish-speaking market.21
Dr. Fernández Dobao explains that, in Spanish, the literal and figurative uses of “fuck” are somewhat distinct. “Follar” is a vulgar word that literally relates to sex, whereas joder can be used in some places where “fuck” is used metaphorically. For example, in English, the following two lines of dialogue use “fuck her/him”:
1. “Fuck him! Scotty, he’s a better boxer he still be alive.”
2.
“What did he do? Fuck her?”
The first one, is translated using joder:
1. “¡Que se joda! Scotty, si hubiese sido buen boxeador aún viviría.”
And the second, where the inquiry is literally “Did he have sex with her?” uses follar:
2. “¿Qué hizo? ¿Follársela?”
However, since there’s no form of joder that will work as an adjective, this means that sentences like “Yes! I’ve fuckin’ looked!” have to be switched around to make “¡Sí joder! ¡He mirado!” (“Yes, fuck it! I’ve looked!”)
The use of “fuck” as a metaphorical verb (“fuck this, fuck that, fuck you”) doesn’t translate at all with joder, however. Spanish has a wider variety of ways of expressing this frustration. For example:
“Have you ever given a guy a foot massage?”
“Fuck you!”
“How many?”
“Fuck you!”
Becomes:
“¿Te importaría masajearle los pies a un hombre?”
“¡Vete al cuerno!” (“Go to the horned one”—sort of like “Go to hell!”)
“¿Has hecho muchos?”
“¡Vete al cuerno!”
While
“Fuck pride! Pride only hurts, it never helps you, fight through that shit.’
becomes
“¡A la mierda el orgullo! [Go to shit with pride] El orgullo sólo hace daño, no te ayudará jamás, lucha contra esa mierda!”
And the interjection “Where the fuck is it?” becomes “¿Dónde cojones está?” or “Where the bollocks is it?”
It’s not just “fuck” that doesn’t translate directly. Motherfucker isn’t used as an insult. Instead, the idea that a man’s wife is fucking around behind his back is a much more common slight with cabrón or cabronazo (cuckold) used instead. “English, motherfucker, do you speak it?” becomes “Mi idioma cabronazo ¿sabes hablarlo?”
Dr. Fernández Dobao says English is much richer in the many different ways that it uses the same few swear words but that Spanish is more creative. Simply translating Pulp Fiction so that it has 1.74 joders per minute would have sounded monotonous and nonsensical. Instead, the translators had to press a much wider range of swear words into service in order to keep up the same level of emotional intensity.
Some translators feel the need to shy away from using so much swearing in order to make their audience feel comfortable with the translated text. Markus Karjalainen from the University of Helsinki studied two Swedish translations of The Catcher in the Rye—one from 1953 and one from 1987. Of the 778 swear words in the original text, the translators omitted 469 in 1953 and 471 in 1987. Both translators left out a lot of the uses of “damn,” “goddam,” and “hell” that make up most of the original book’s swearing, and they also dropped a lot of the next most common swear word, “bastard.” For example, “I mean I’m not going to be a goddam surgeon or a violinist or anything anyway” becomes “Jag tänker i alla fall inte bli nån gammal kirurg eller violinist eller så” (1953) and “Jag tänker inte bli vare sig kirurg eller violinist så det spelar ingen roll” (1987), both of which roughly translate to “I don’t think I’ll end up as [some old] surgeon . . .”
Even though there are perfectly serviceable swear words for all of the omissions in the two translations of Catcher in the Rye, the translators prefer to keep the swearing to a minimum. According to Mr. Karjalainen, the Swedish temperament means that a little swearing goes a lot farther than it does in the English of J. D. Salinger.
“When I think of Sweden and its people, the first word that comes to mind is ‘lagom.’* [For most average Swedes] moderation is a virtue and extremes in either direction should be avoided,” says Mr. Karjalainen. “Lagom can be a positive thing, but it can also lead to an apparent superficiality on many levels. Not saying what one really means; suppressing emotional language to great lengths to avoid contrast and conflict.”
The meaning of language goes beyond the dictionary definitions of words used: the spirit and sense of how we swear changes as we switch from culture to culture and it’s easy for this sense to be lost in translation, even when it’s the same person writing. Julien Green, a bilingual author, was partway through writing a book in his native French when his publisher asked if he would, instead, write it in English. He intended to simply translate what he had already written from French to English. However:
Rereading what I had written [I] realized that I was writing another book, a book so different in tone from the French that the whole aspect of the subject must, of necessity, be altered. It was as if, in writing English, I had become another person . . . There was so little resemblance between what I wrote in English and what I had already written in French that it might almost be doubted that the same person was the author of these two pieces of work.22
As we saw in chapter 6, even within a single country the differences in swearing can be significant to the point where you can guess the gender of a speaker just from the type of swearing that they use (here). However, the differences between languages are more significant. Different cultures have different taboos, whether it’s the religious swearing of Italian or Canadian French, or the mustache-based insults of the Middle East. This poses a huge challenge for language learners and translators alike.
When we move between French, Japanese, and English, the words “chat,” “neko,” and “cat” all signify more or less the same thing. But the way we express ourselves emotionally, even the types of emotion that it is permissible to express, vary widely. Language is culturally laden, and no part of language more so than swearing. The effect of swearing is dependent on the emotional states we experience when we see, hear, or use them and this emotional effect can be either freeing or overwhelming, depending on the kind of taboos that we have internalized.
And we can’t simply look up the dirty words in a dictionary: not that that ever stops me. The only way to truly understand the force of swearing in another language is to experience it, in real life or from real culture. We have to immerse ourselves in feelings in order to learn the true meaning of swearing, and perhaps that’s why some of us find it harder to pick up the nuances of language as we get older.
“To become skilled, one needs a lot of practice,’ says Dr. Dewaele.23 “After the sociopragmatic faux pas with my Spanish friends [over his use of joder], I decided to limit my swearing in Spanish to Captain Haddock’s favorite expression ‘rayos y truenos.’”† Even the most fluent of linguistics professors finds it hard to translate his feelings into the right type of bad words.
_____________
* While there’s no direct translation into English, lagom carries the sense of “enough” or “just right.” It is a word that reflects a national pride and preoccupation with moderation.
† “Thunder and lightning,” here used as a mild outburst, in the same way that the English version of Captain Haddock says, “Blistering barnacles!”
Conclusion
Imagine our very earliest ancestors as they first experimented with the basics of language. This new cognitive tool opened up a whole new world of collaboration: language allows you to transfer knowledge, plans, and desires from your own mind to someone else’s. Our ancestors can make effective plans for collaborative hunting (“You go and scare that antelope so it runs over here and we’ll catch it as it goes past”). They learned how to pass on vital skills to their children (“Never grab a hissing vine”), they even learned to think out loud (“Do you think the antelope might be fatter in the next valley? And fewer snakes?”).
Something else happens at the same time. Imagine those ancestors planning their antelope hunt. “I’m tired of antelope!” says one. “Can’t we have hippo?” “Hippos are really dangerous and hard to catch!” “But antelopes are stringy and there’s barely enough meat for a week!” Tempers start to flare.
In one cave, the curseless cave, either the hunters go their separate ways or they resort to violence. In the first instance, one fails to catch the speedy ant
elope and goes hungry, the other is trodden on by an angry hippopotamus, gets gangrene, and dies. In the second, the disagreement becomes a physical fight, at the end of which neither is in any fit state to catch anything.
In the second cave, they’re trying something new. They have a powerful set of words that refer to things and behaviors that cause shame or fear. Maybe it’s to do with illness (“May your leg go septic after being trodden on by a hippo”) or bodily functions (“You are as welcome in this cave as antelope turds”) or the deities that cause the sun to rise or the crops to ripen. These words have real emotive force. Instead of coming to blows, the dwellers in this cave fling insults and curses. No bones are broken and everyone is fit for the hunt at the end of it.
Evolutionary psychology is a bit like the Just So stories: there’s no way to know for sure that any of this happened. Using taboo words might have caused more fights, led to people being ostracized, splintered tribes. Our ancestors might not have developed swearing anywhere near as precociously as our chimpanzee cousins. But the idea of swearing as a social tool certainly hangs together. It’s consistent with what we know of our history; that banding together in bigger societies is both stressful and necessary to develop the culture that we have. It’s consistent with what we observe today; swearing helps us bear pain, work together, and communicate emotions.
I started this book by saying that I didn’t want to encourage you to swear more. Swearing is like mustard; a great ingredient but a lousy meal. We need that part of our language to keep its potency, its slightly risky nature, otherwise it wouldn’t be swearing. We drop those words that don’t give us a sufficiently strong punch anymore and pick up words that have taken on the mantle of the unsayable.
