And today the conversation eventually turned into a conversation about swearing. They turn to many things, and I shall have to start calling my student Terentius. One of the important things a language teacher has to do is give accurate instruction on swearing. Why? because if you are going to encounter another language it would be better if you had all these things straight rather than stumble around in them, especially in our day when you cannot avoid it. People are squeamish, but they ought not to be. Why should this area of life remain unexamined?
Here is an interesting question: do you think there are words in your language that ought to go out of existence? That’s not so much a question to offer me an answer on, as it is one for a person to consider carefully.
Anyway, I am all prepared to teach about English swearing, and I was all prepared to learn about Colombian swearing, especially as it differs from countries around, which it does.
I know it differs because the whole system of swearing in Colombia is different from that of Mexico. Not only do Mexicans notoriously proliferate terms, they don’t really use the terms the same way. Among the worst things you can say in Spanish is the word Jonathan Swift makes free with in Gulliver’s Travels: Whore. Remember La Puta? It is horrible and vulgar. Mexicans like to use it straight or add the word Mother: Puta madre! I’ve never heard that here.
Here is an interesting variation: in Spanish you can add superlative suffixes and diminutive suffixes, and they do. A diminutive, for example, mitigates the insult or offence.
One of the big differences is that in Colombian usage most swearing uses contractions, or slurred pronunciation. So the most common thing for them to say is ‘hijueputa’ which translates as Whoreson—and can be found in Shakespeare. Hijueputa is a slurred form of Hijo de Puta, and Hijuemadre is a slurred form of something that will make no sense in English: Son of a mother. What is also interesting is that they persist in thinking Hijueputa translates as Son of a bitch. This translation obscures for them the semantic range of the English word ‘bitch’ but in such a way that getting them out of the umbrage poses a dilemma. Try explaining how they’re right and how they’re wrong. Curious, isn’t it?
Good thing I haven’t had to do it, though I have had to explain that ‘bitch’ is the proper translation of ‘perra.’ Perhaps that is the solution to the question above.
It illustrates something that happens in the reverse direction. When somebody says ‘You damn bastard’ in a movie, it comes over as ‘Maldito bastardo:’ a pretty effete and funny appellation. But this is another thing that emerges when you compare swearing, not across languages, but within a language and across countries. There are things they say in Madrid that they laugh at here. They use an obscenity, but they combine it oddly (read For Whom the Bell Tolls to get a clear idea of it). It just doesn’t have the same effect in Latin America it apparently has in Spain.
While most of the swearing in Colombia has to do with progeniture and parturition (one of the most insulting is to say someone was badly born–mal parido, and I’ve found they generally avoid it like we avoid the word Nigger, but maybe it is just getting old fashioned like for us ‘Confound’ is), illegitimacy appears to carry no great offense. Besides that, the category of profanity (in comparison so copious in English—profanity as opposed to obscenity, also copious and heartily Anglo-Saxon) is virtually nonexistent in Spanish. It just doesn’t have the force it carries in English.
Which gives rise to several interesting questions about the concept of profanity and how the Spanish speaker receives and understands it, doesn’t it? I think the sound of a word is important for its effect (our Anglo-Saxon monosyllables are witness to that, and how Mexicans managed to turn the innocuous term that describes a cook’s helper into swearing has got to be somehow related to it, I’d think), but these observations indicate the importance of a concept and its history, and how we handle the reality behind it.
The nice thing is I have a student all willing to pontificate about it, explain and illustrate freely. And he has traveled a lot, especially to Venezuela, where they have idiosyncratic ways of dealing with each other (he tells me he made it a rule to take a Venezuelan with him anytime he visited clients, just as a cultural translator). I still have some other words I want to ask him about that Mexican categories exclude from polite conversation and perhaps Colombian don’t.
Unknowing 