Your mother's south slavic tongue

There is a short but fascinating book called Your Mother's Tongue, by Stephen Burgen. I don't remember everything about it - I borrowed a copy and read it about eight years ago - but it was very interesting. This was mostly because he charted the trends in swears, and how the tendency to swear and the nature of them varies geographically around Europe. Norwegians, I recall, are wimpy at it - I think the worst that can be done is to call somebody a Devil; latin people from the south are much more prone to the worst, or at least most insulting & sexual forms of swearing. The British were a strange exception, being north Europeans who swore more than the others of a similar latitude, and English and Spanish speakers in the Americas hardly swear at all compared to their European counterparts. And so on.

In Germany, where I live, the swears are essentially only scatological and any attempt to insult or affectionately cajole somebody about the sexual habits of his mother will either not be understood, or just laughed at (Waaait a minute, you think my mother is a what? What does this have to do with what we are talking about?). I understand this perspective when I think about the Spanish insult cabron (cuckold) which is very complicated , particularly when applied out of context (let's see, I just accidentally spilled your beer, and now you are saying that, though you don't know her, or indeed if she exists at all, that my significant other is having relations with some other man also unknown to you). And of course in English, it is all about the F-word, unless you come from some minority that has imported the concept of insulting another's mother from elsewhere (i.e. MoFo among African Americans).

I should say that I swear - and I swear too much. It's a bad habit, I know, but as with everybody, I try to avoid doing it in polite company. I firmly believe that a well-placed swear is about the most effective literary tool there is. For a great, great example, see the Martin Amis Autobiography Experience where he talks about his father's - Kingsley Amis - best ever instance of the F-word as said by an angry dog. But through my own overuse I think I ruin my chances of any kind of suitable emphasis.

But it's fair to say that my foul-mouthed behavior comes nowhere close to that of the men I know from the former Yugoslavia. Get a couple of men from Serbia going and - whether they are closest friends or casual business colleagues - and the invective invects. And man oh man, are they dirty.

As anybody who isn't a monoglot knows: swearing in another language is a tricky business. Frankly, you should almost never do it unless you are fully, Joseph Conrad-like, fluent. You'll always offend, and never get the use of it right. But undeterred, or just seeking some additional insights into the place/language that I had found myself increasingly associated with, I asked a few years ago how one swore (psovati incidentally) in Serbian or Croatian. G. was no good, wouldn't tell me anything: don't swear, you savage, it's primitive. But every now and then, when something fell on her toe, or she dropped something, very very occasionally an utterance would come: P--- M---! What was that, I would ask, never to be told. Nothing, nothing.

Eventually, I worked out that this was absolutely the darkest of all swears that exist. When I realised, what it was (my mother's WHAT?), I started spotting it all over the place. Two people speaking in a cafe dropping it into an otherwise ordinary conversation. Elsewhere, there is the more standard fornicator type of invective, that I think is more common in Croatia (at least the Croatians I know use it more often). Related to this verb, some of early attempts to conjugate the similar sounding verb to eat (jesti or ja jedem) led, after some forgivable mix-ups with ds and bs to some interesting looks (We f--- dinner now?). Indeed, people sometimes warn you about this mix-up if they have ever previously dealt with anybody learning this martian language.

If I had to draw a parallel it would be to the way that I remember the English speech of working class Quebecois, that I would sometimes encounter during my student days in Ontario. The F-word came typically once or twice a sentence. And I think it is similar in the sense that nobody means anything by it. Obviously no insult is intended: it has just become a useful adjective/adverb/interjection. It might as well be OK or like or more suitably Ovaj or Važi.

I don't have a sensible ending to this, but one word of warning: to the prudish West, swearing is often frowned upon, even by hipocrits who swear constantly, and given the (often unjustified) reputation of people from the former Yugoslavia, perhaps it is wise either to cut down on it, or at the very least, never translate what you are saying about your friend's mother's anatomy to some curious outsider.

And of course, I know, I can go f--- myself. Oh, and f--- you too.