Don't be f...stupid - we like it!

The little boy I was, growing up in the South of Germany, was quite surprised to hear a man speak "Hochdeutsch" and coming from a big city called Hamburg. He had a lisp and his tongue slightly slipped out of his mouth when saying words like Straße (street) or Spiel (game). For me it sounded very posh, a sort of upper class language, only very fine adults would speak, except my mum or my aunt. I understood, that my beloved parents were no real authorities, linguistically spoken. Then, out in the street, with some of my friends, I came across words I never heard at home and, sometimes, did not even understand. When I used them at home, my dad laughed and my mother looked serious and asked, where do you learn such words? I  would, however, never have given away the name of a pal, knowing that the use of such swear-words was sort of highly illegal. Only Martin Luther, who apparently created modern German was allowed to use words like fart, shag and others.

Naughty boy?

Then I started to learn languages and was immediately fascinated by the dark side of it. In Spanish it was a quote from Hemingway's For whom the Bell tolls: "Io cago en la leche de mi madre" (I shit into my mother's milk). What an insult I thought, when I had understood what it meant. In Latin, at an earlier stage, I learned that "carpe diem" meant "enjoy your day" and then, the teacher added frivolously: noctemque, meaning "and the night". For a little boy that was difficult to understand. But I knew that this was meant to be naughty. French, I must have been older than 16, was a real challenge, because the French seemed to have a natural access to swear-words. I therefore limit myself to one standard phrase every boy would know by heart without understanding: "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?" And "Putain!" (prostitute) is just the equivalent of "Scheisse" in German. One gets easily used to it. 

Naughty boy!

The English language seemed for me a rather posh expression of the sort of language they taught in Oxford. Both the Queen and, to some extend, Maggie Thatcher, practised this sort of unnatural, slightly stilted version of what I heard later in India: "I like rice with curry" said a friend with a rather peculiar rolling of his eyes. So, English for me is a language with many facets, all of which seem interesting but class related, somehow. The exception to that, I can accept, is of course American English which is for me a sort of a  in-mouth-hot-potato-rolling exercise. Quite easy to understand for Latin-Americans. But, lets come to the more vulgar side of the language: there was a film, where the "heroes" used the f-word every 20 seconds. Disgusting. Swear-word inflation is inflation in the worst sense. Diarrhoea of words.

Bloody hell, an angel!

On the other hand, a language without the occasional use of a dirty word sounds artificial and boring. A speaker should be able to handle a complete range of words, the art being to use them in the right sense, the right moment, with the right audience. What a f... idea that is! Abso-f...-lutely great! Right?