An amusing quote from Li Juan’s Winter Pasture: One Woman’s Journey with China’s Kazakh Herders (Astra Publishing, 2021), courtesy of Joel at Far Outliers:
Of course, there were occasions when the siblings argued. Sometimes they even insulted each other in Mandarin. Sister would shout, “Ben dan!” (idiot) and brother would shout back, “Wang ba dan!” (bastard)—which amused them to no end.…
Then, they both turned to ask me, what do “ben dan” and “wang ba dan” mean? For the sake of complete honesty, I offered them a boring literal explanation: a ben dan is a chicken egg that’s gone bad. And a wang ba dan … luckily, I had just seen “The Tortoise and the Hare” in Nurgün’s Kazakh textbook, so I pointed to the tortoise: “This is wang ba.” They let out an “oh.” Then I added, “Wang ba dan is its child.” A disappointed “oh”; they were unable to understand what was so special about a bad egg and a tortoise’s child that these terms could be used as insults? Thoroughly underwhelmed, that was the last time they insulted each other using these words.
Of course, that’s not “complete honesty,” it’s prissy disingenuousness; Joel adds this further explanation:
My ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (U. Hawaii Press, 1996) defines 王八 wángba as 1. tortoise, 2. cuckold, 3. son-of-a-bitch. It next lists two expressions flagged as colloquial: 王八蛋 wángbadàn N. turtle’s egg, son-of-a-bitch; and 王八羔子 wángba gāozi N. baby turtle, son-of-a-bitch.
The same source defines 笨 bèn as ADJ. 1. stupid, dull; 2. clumsy, awkward; 3. cumbersome. Lower on the same page it lists 笨蛋 bèndàn N. fool, idiot.
I heard several of those terms on a regular basis when I was living in Taiwan in 1977-78.
I’ve been reading the Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriot with my daughters. It’s the only instance I can remember where the word bitch means female dog. Jarring to me.
My uncle translated Chinese insults literally in his version of the Jin Ping Mei. I don’t think he was being prissy, given the enormous amount of erotic and scatological content of the book, which is accurately rendered. I think it was his belief that you should be able to encompass the literal meaning and the derogatory meaning in your own sense of the word. There’s a lot that is unusual about his translation, which I believe was written with an audience of 20-30 international scholars in mind, and the thought that hopefully others might still be able to enjoy it.
@Ryan: I remember a scene in the television version, where Peter Davison (who played Tristan and thus served as the butt of most of the show’s jokes) kept saying “bitch.” It was somewhat jarring, but in fact, real dog breeders or fanciers still use bitch that way all the time. At dog shows—whether on television or down on the floor—you can hear everyone using bitch un-self-consciously.
Is it prissy disingenuousness? Or is it “someone has to be the adult here” and this is, to my mind, an amusing way to knock the wind out of their sails, without actually lying to anyone.
It’s not the whole truth, but it’s arguably nothing but the truth – undermining the ‘fun’ of swearing for a reaction without actually telling a lie. I might have written ‘scrupulous honesty’, if I was going for slightly humorous effect.
Well, the reason a turtle’s egg is a bastard is that the turtle can’t see who’s mounting her from behind. Even leaving aside whether that should be explained to children, I think it’s difficult to explain to children that young.
Also, being that young, they might not even have internalized enough patriarchy to understand why “bastard” is supposed to be an insult (to the bastard at least, as opposed to one or both of the bastard’s parents).
I see woke lexicographers have yet to add a usage label to “Jesuitical”
@dm
I don’t teally understand distinction between “insult to me” and “insult to one or both of my parents”. I would interpret the latter as in fact a worse insult to me, implying I am the way I am for genetic or family environmental reasons. Is this different for you?
Huh? Yes. Why would you insult another person when you actually want to insult me? That makes no sense – except in a culture where culpability is heritable.
If I’m the way I am for genetic or family-environmental reasons, that’s not my fault. (If genetic, it isn’t even anybody’s fault.) I can hear the whooshing sound of the insult flying way above my head.
Surely you could say just the same about “You are grotesquely ugly and very stupid”, which I would, myself, interpret as an insult.
Indeed, depending on just how low an opinion you have of the reality of free will, you could apply the same logic to any insult whatsoever.
Is it prissy disingenuousness? Or is it “someone has to be the adult here” and this is, to my mind, an amusing way to knock the wind out of their sails, without actually lying to anyone.
Depends on your point of view. If you take the position that people shouldn’t use naughty language, then yes, it’s “an amusing way to knock the wind out of their sails,” and that’s obviously how the author saw it. I myself love naughty language and feel that she spoiled their fun to satisfy her own sense of propriety.
cuckold
“What does ‘cuck’ mean?”
“It’s short for cuckoo bird”
“But why you people would use cuckoo bird as an insult? It makes no sense!”
@sfr
Are you ironic her? Cuckoo deposits eggs in another bird’s nest. So a cuckolded man is the father who feeds the baby cuckoo and not his own baby.
You made my point.
It makes just as much sense as calling someone a turtle egg.
PlasticPaddy: You’re missing the point. Of course the insult can be explained; so can “turtle’s egg,” so can “son of a bitch,” so can most insults. But to pretend that the literal meaning from which the insult is derived is the only thing that counts, so that to try to insult someone by calling them a turtle’s egg or a cuckold is silly because of the literal meaning, is not only disingenuous but frankly dishonest. SFReader is just exemplifying that with an insult more familiar to English-speakers than the Chinese ones in the post.
Edit: As SFReader pointed out while I was typing.
He is prissily disingenuous.
You are too literal-minded.
I am completely honest.
Yes. Sorry, SFR. I thought DM might have been ironic when he was serious, and with you it was the opposite. ????
In Run, Lola, Run, the main character’s father describes her as a “cuckoo’s egg”—a phrasing that I don’t think I had encountered before in English, but for which the meaning was clear. However, I don’t remember what this corresponded to in the original Lola Rennt, and I can’t seem to find the German script online.
It’s easy enough to find the subtitles . . . and the phrase does not occur in the English subs I found. But it looks like two different English translations exist.
English “transcript”, where the phrase does occur (was this the dubbed version?)
English subtitles (note lots of little different word choices from the previous, including that the actual father left rather than died):
German subtitles:
GT & dict.leo.org insist that the spelling should be “Kuckucksei”, as does Duden (which gives more than the literal translation of GT & dict.leo).
(I keep forgetting to click on the translation in GT to see alternates — it does have “odd one” as an alternate translation)
I’ve spent years philosophizing about ugliness and stupidity. 🙂 In the end, my preferred definition of stupidity is when you’re able to think things through, but you don’t. Perfectly suitable for an insult.
On ugliness I can’t possibly be representative, but yeah, I personally would not feel insulted if called ugly. I’d be like “who cares about your personal taste?” Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. Case in point: myself. My taste is such that I find most people ugly, and the next largest group is those who aren’t on that scale at all. It’s one of the great failures of Western culture that it keeps paying lip service to the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and then promptly turns around and acts as if it’s objective, or partially objective, or at least as if there’s a broad majority consensus on it. No. There isn’t. There really, genuinely isn’t. Rant over.
In theory, sure, but not in practice. :-þ Often enough, the Viennese Explanation (“because they’re stupid”) is the most parsimonious one I have access to. 🙂 I also think I’ve committed quite avoidable acts of stupidity myself…!
Not remotely. Calling someone a cuckold makes as much sense as calling someone a turtle. But to call someone a turtle’s egg, or a bastard, insults another person, and the actually intended target of the insult is expected to feel insulted just by association.
Really, for this to work, you need to believe that families have a collective, heritable honor that can be insulted collectively. I didn’t grow up with that concept. It seems like most of you did…? I only know it from reading, really.
Must be simply Kuckucksei, which will be immediately understood, but I don’t think I’ve encountered metamorphical usages of it.
Ha, the original doesn’t say whether he died or left – just that he didn’t learn of it, wasn’t around to hear of it!
The usage of Kuckucksei looks like the metaphor is being crafted on the fly.
The usage of Kuckucksei looks like the metaphor is being crafted on the fly.
I don’t know – it is in Duden:
“2b. Kind eines anderen Vaters, das in einer Familie großgezogen wird.”
It sounds like it is a standard metaphor in German, although directly referring to somebody as “Kuckucksei” may be as uncommon in German as calling someone a “cuckoo’s egg” in English. The OED does not have a separate entry for the phrase, but it does record one instance—this rather bizarre poem from 1627 by the Anglican clergyman Phineas Fletcher. That the Latin title is “Locustae, vel pietas Iesuitica,” versus the English “The Locusts, or Apollyonists,” pretty much tells you what need to know about Fletcher’s viewpoint. The relevant stanza is:
Of course, this is part of a much more extended metaphor equating the Jesuits with various types of vermin, so the bird reference is particularly apt here—although the metaphor has multiple levels, and the sense of a human child fathered by another is itself still a layer of metaphor.
But to call someone a turtle’s egg, or a bastard, insults another person, and the actually intended target of the insult is expected to feel insulted just by association.
I’m puzzled at the debate here. Surely the whole issue is legitimacy in a patriarchal society. The Chinese traditionally had elaborate family trees running back generations to the patriarchal ancestor. Calling someone a bastard is to deny their legitimacy within the family line. The insult is not by association; it’s directed at the person themselves.
There is a curse in Wuhan that goes 婊子养的 piàozi yǎng de ‘brought up by a whore’. Ok, you could argue that it’s an insult to the mother, but it’s actually implying that the person insulted does not have any legitimate status in society — born to an unknown father and a woman who sells her body.
I’m puzzled at the debate here.
There’s no debate as far as I can see; DM is just saying he doesn’t feel the sting of such insults and is puzzled that other people do.
I looks like one metaphorical meaning of “cuckoo’s egg” is “anomaly” (“odd one”); the translators of Lola rennt make this more pejorative by translating the first instance of “Kuckucksei” as “freak” and “weirdo”.
I am reminded of Clifford Stoll’s book The Cuckoo’s Egg, where a computer hacking/cracking investigation was triggered by a 75-cent accounting anomaly.
It looks like Stoll did not do this intentionally; he was thinking of the hacker’s programs as being a metaphorical egg: “Our mysterious visitor laid an egg-program into our computer, letting the system hatch it and feed it privileges.”
I’m actually wondering, could the sense of “anomaly” have arisen in German from Stoll’s book? Or did it already exist? Was Stoll’s usage just a big coincidence?
To some people, and especially in some cultures, your lineage is “who you are.” I do not feel that way, and neither does David Marjanović.
Culturally, of course, there can be a great deal of variation in how important biological descent is, even when family genealogy is a big deal. The ancient Romans, including the elite, looked positively on adoption as a way of continuing the family line. Chinese Confucianism is less well disposed toward adoption.
In science fiction: In the movie Alien Mine* the final denouement is about how the alien Drac, for whom genealogy is very important, although (or because) they are parthenogenic, nonetheless have a flexible understanding of family ancestry.
* The movie adds a more action-oriented climax to the original Barry B. Longyear novella, which was probably a good decision. At the studio’s suggestion, the climax was set in and around a mining facility, apparently for the sake of viewers who might misunderstand the title.
In Taiwan my students told me that the use of turtles in insults was a Mainland Chinese practice, and that Taiwanese (and I think they included Taiwan Chinese) had a much friendlier attitude toward turtles.
Adoption to continue a family line is fairly common among Chinese, but if possible it’s a nephew, cousin, etc. within the same descent group. The way I’ve seen it described makes it seem like a simple reassignment within the clan.
>kuckocksei
It was mistranscribed. The actual insult was kuckochse.
the translators of Lola rennt make this more pejorative by translating the first instance of “Kuckucksei” as “freak” and “weirdo”.
The German dialogue is a lot more effective because the word carries both metaphorical meanings. In the initial exchange, the father uses “Kuckucksei” seemingly with the other metaphorical meaning in Duden “etwas Untergeschobenes, was sich als etwas von zweifelhaftem Wert oder als unangenehme Aufgabe herausstellt” – where “freak” is a plausible translation (and seems to be the way Lola understands it) but he then calls her that a second time to make it clear he really believes she is not just a freak, she is not his biological daughter.
The insult is both directed at the person themselves, and it is by association – at the individual’s family line, at other people than the intended target. It only works in such a patriarchal culture, is my point.
Known in German (Hurensohn, Hurenkind), but old-fashioned or associated with people of Turkish background.
I’m not puzzled that people who grew up in a sufficiently patriarchal culture do; I’m surprised there are still people in the West who seem to think the ability to be insulted by insults to (carefully selected) other people is logical/natural/universal.
Possible, though I don’t think the book was more popular than the movie. Anyway, this is the kind of thing that is often regional, and that the people who use it often don’t know is regional. Which words and idioms count as Standard German and which don’t is really fuzzy, and so is which ones you can expect your audience to understand.
Yes.
I’m not puzzled that people who grew up in a sufficiently patriarchal culture do
I’m puzzled that you think there are non-patriarchal cultures.
There are less patriarchal cultures that are not, as I put it, “sufficiently” patriarchal for that to work. I grew up in one. Neither of my grandfathers did.
Are you quite sure that everybody in the culture you grew up in (assuming you’re talking about a wider “culture” than your own family) is as indifferent as you are to being called traditional insults? It’s easy to generalize from one’s own experience.
In other words, could you go into a bar and call someone a son of a bitch (in the appropriate local terms) with impunity?
As DM said, nowadays in Germany that kind of insult is associated with people of Turkish or similar oriental background, and with gang culture (stereotypically overlapping). Me or DM as not belonging to that culture using that kind of insult would be comical. In a bar, there’s half a chance that the person so insulted would laugh their head off, but of course with the right amount of adrenaline and alcohol that insult may also be taken as fighting words. It’s maybe comparable to you going into an American bar and calling someone “nefarious knave”.
It’s maybe comparable to you going into an American bar and calling someone “nefarious knave”.
Allow me to doubt that. I’m perfectly willing to accept that you and DM would laugh it off, but not that it is only “orientals” who are primitive enough to resent such insults. I think you gravely overestimate the percentage of men in bars who would agree with you. However, I invite you to carry out an experiment and report back on the results!
I don’t think this is really to do with lineage specifically. It’s insulting someone by insulting something/someone they value, for whatever reason.
It’s generally considered insulting to say “your girlfriend is very ugly”, though few are descended from their girlfriends these days.
Linguists would be likely – quite rightly – to interpret as a deliberate insult the remark (from someone who know what they did for a living) that “linguistics is a criminal waste of time and scarce resources which should be deployed elsewhere, in something actually beneficial to humanity.”
“Son of a bitch” and “bastard” are recognized as unfriendly regardless of literal meaning. These words are thrown around pretty casually, though, and to really insult someone you’d need to use something stronger, I think. It does depend on context and I suppose there are regional and ethnic variations.
In my experience homophobic insults are weightier.
. I’m perfectly willing to accept that you and DM would laugh it off, but not that it is only “orientals” who are primitive enough to resent such insults
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough – I didn’t say that only “orientals” (keeping that word as a shorthand) would resent such insults, it’s generally only “orientals” who use them in contemporary Germany. Someone like me or DM using them would look like us pretending to belong to those specific cultures, which would be comical. We might also run the danger of being seen as mocking them. In a bar argument between Germans without “oriental” background or affinity to gang culture, I simply wouldn’t expect that kind of insult to come up.
In a bar argument between Germans without “oriental” background or affinity to gang culture, I simply wouldn’t expect that kind of insult to come up.
I’m sorry to keep pressing on this, I don’t mean to come across as simply refusing to believe you about your own culture, but I am very familiar with members of what we may call the “intelligentsia” — the kind of people who read LH, say — thinking they know more about the, shall we say, lower strata of their own cultures than they actually do. This was rubbed in my face when I was doing grad work at Yale, living in the cocoon of the academic community, then dropped out and lived in the actual city of New Haven, where Yale theoretically is located but with which it rarely interacts, and hung out with actual New Haveners, often drunks and low-lifes because I was working minimum-wage jobs and enjoyed their company, and I saw the wide gap between Yale perceptions and city reality. Similarly, in New York City I hung out with middle-class/academic types but also frequented the kind of bars that used to be called “dives” and enjoyed being immersed in the smoke-and-profanity-filled climate (with Billy Joel or Frank Sinatra on the jukebox rather than cool jazz or the latest hip indie band). Now, if you tell me that you have similar habits and are intimately familiar with the kind of venues where people would react violently to certain insults, and you have heard people insult each other in other ways but never in ancestry-insulting ways, then I will be more convinced (though of course I would want to see an actual study of the matter). But if you’re simply generalizing from the fact that people like you (and DM) would never use such insults or take them seriously, then I will continue to suspect that the average member of the German-speaking lumpenproletariat is not as advanced in their views and linguistic habits. Franz Biberkopf may be dead (not that he ever existed, but you know what I mean), but I doubt his kind has vanished from the face of the earth.
To expand, “sonofabitch” is almost like “thingamajig” as a vague throwaway word. But the various homophobic slurs are weighty enough that I am reluctant to type them, sort of like the n-word.
I am more sympathetic to Hans and David than Hat is. Germany does have a large population of Turkish origin within which accusations of illegitimacy are much weightier than they are for most Germans. It’s not a question of who is nicer or more civilized, but just the gravity of illegitimacy, which correlates with forms of family organization and social organization. Few people get their status from their membership in a lineage any more, and marriages are not made by negotiations between lineages.
I, for example, am from the Mayflower lineage of Elizabeth Emerson, but do I brag about it? (Well, yes, but I’m atypical in this regard).
https://murderpedia.org/female.E/e/emerson-elizabeth.htm
I am more sympathetic to Hans and David than Hat is. Germany does have a large population of Turkish origin within which accusations of illegitimacy are much weightier than they are for most Germans.
That’s not the point. Forget about the population of Turkish origin; they’re entirely irrelevant here except as a convenient distraction. Picture a lowlife bar in a seedy neighborhood of a German or Austrian city where no Turks have ever ventured; the question is whether the bums, ditch-diggers, and other consumers of the very cheapest beer and booze who frequent the joint are indifferent to expressions like “son of a bitch/whore” (there are equivalents in all languages I’m familiar with). If so, if even the lowliest German-speaker has developed ideologically to the point that he (since we’re largely talking about males here) is indifferent to family and laughs at insults about his mother, then I will doff my hat to the aufgeklärt German people. But I continue to doubt it.
Well, you’re certainly right that I don’t tend to frequent that kind of place. My knowledge of such situations is mostly due to TV, films, and books, plus encounters with occasional drunks on public transport. Maybe German media portray such places in an entirely wrong manner, substituting invented insults (homophobic, ableist, racist) for insults people actually use. Maybe I’ll have to seek out these places; a problem would be that a lot of people in such bars would be affiliated with the gang culture that uses insults like “Deine Mutter war eine Hure” oder “Ich fick deine Mutter”, etc. So finding a pure German Biberkopf not part of that culture itching for a bar fight might prove difficult.
Fair enough. I’m not actually suggesting that you start hanging out in lowlife bars — I’d feel terrible if you got a bottle broken over your head! I’m just trying to inculcate a little doubt, since I know how easy it is to generalize inappropriately from personal experience.
Picture a lowlife bar in a seedy neighborhood of a German or Austrian city where no Turks have ever ventured;
You won’t find such places.
the question is whether the bums, ditch-diggers, and other consumers of the very cheapest beer and booze who frequent the joint are indifferent to expressions like “son of a bitch/whore” (there are equivalents in all languages I’m familiar with).
Again, my point was not that they would be indifferent – they would understand the insult, and even if they’d feel that it didn’t apply to them, they may well react to the intent of insulting. The point is that an insult like “Hurensohn” is bleached and sounds like something out of a book, while stuff like “Deine Mutter war eine Hure” or “Ich fick deine Mutter” belong to a specific, oriental-influenced gang culture; it’s not a kind of insult one uses if one doesn’t belong to that culture (or wants to claim affiliation or imitate it as “cool”).
Even in English, calling someone a “whoreson” would probably elicit puzzled bemusement. Although “son of a whore” might be more comprehensible, and more immediately antagonizing.
“sonofabitch” is almost like “thingamajig” as a vague throwaway word
Ah, a Northeasterner.
You won’t find such places. […] Again, my point was not that they would be indifferent – they would understand the insult, and even if they’d feel that it didn’t apply to them, they may well react to the intent of insulting. The point is that an insult like “Hurensohn” is bleached and sounds like something out of a book, while stuff like “Deine Mutter war eine Hure” or “Ich fick deine Mutter” belong to a specific, oriental-influenced gang culture; it’s not a kind of insult one uses if one doesn’t belong to that culture (or wants to claim affiliation or imitate it as “cool”).
Sigh. After seeming to acknowledge my point, you retreat into your certainty that you know what such places are like, whether certain kinds exist, and exactly how the people who frequent them talk, even though you admit you don’t frequent them yourself. Never mind; we will have to agree to disagree. (Obviously I’m not claiming I myself know what such places are like where you are, but I know what they’re like in general, and I doubt your imaginings are more accurate than mine. We might as well be discussing bars on Mars.)
Of course, you hedge by talking about “a specific, oriental-influenced gang culture” and then suggesting there are people who want to “claim affiliation or imitate it as ‘cool’”; a Russian could say the same about the famously vile Russian curses — yes, people use them, but they’re just imitating gangsters. That’s not really sensible; if people use them, they use them. And you seem to be blaming “orientals” for all gang culture, which is… well, it sounds a bit problematic. I confess I have no knowledge of such gangs, but I doubt German-speakers had to learn from Turks how to operate them.
Does anyone want to opine on why “Idiot” in the German original of Lola Rennt was translated into English as “jerk”? Was it just that the translator(s) felt a need to do something, or is there really such a significant semantic gap between German “Idiot” and English “idiot” that a different word is necessary?
I think we’re still talking past each other. You seem to imagine some kind of lowlife / proletarian German culture unaffected by immigration; my point is that kind of thing almost doesn’t exist anymore. Sure there are cheap bars where the customers are almost 100% German, but these Germans will then be 50+ of age. And when I’m talking about gang culture, I’m not saying that foreigners brought crime and gangsterism to Germany. I’m talking about a certain set of behaviours and attitudes, that has its origins partially in oriental culture and partially in American rap and “gangsta” culture, that is cultivated in a certain milieu and imitated by young people. The kind of insult we’re discussing is typical for that culture and would sound out of place when used elsewhere.
(And prissiness doesn’t come into play here – as I said, I have experienced drunk Germans swearing on public transport, and wouldn’t be astonished hearing homophobic, racist or ableist slurs from them.)
OK, I think I see what you mean, and I don’t disagree.
in my (reasonably extensive) time as a habituée of dive bars (mainly in nyc) and more ‘classy’ wateringholes, i’m not sure the currency of insulting people’s mothers tracks class in the ways that hat has described. this may just be shift over the past several decades (i’m certainly not disputing hat’s account of his experience!) or may be about other particulars.
in my own experience (speaking about at-least-nominally-straight spaces): a formulaic “sonofabitch” is fairly neutral in almost all contexts – and not any kind of fighting words unless there’s been a lot of preparatory work. but a middleclass hipster bar is the easiest place to start a fight by specifically calling someone’s mother a whore – and a much more likely place for someone to do that. in the dives i’ve known, it might be a bigger insult in the abstract (and that’s partly why it’s an unlikely one to appear), but concretely, it’s less likely to land. among other things, there’s a better chance that that people know each other’s mothers, and might or might not like them (and liking them or not matters). there’s also a much wider range of opinions about sex work and promiscuity, and a general willingness to admit that both exist, where in middleclass bars they function almost entirely as negative abstractions.
i’m talking about a certain set of behaviours and attitudes, that has its origins partially in oriental culture and partially in American rap and “gangsta” culture
and to me, this kind of explanation – which is just as common among middleclass white folks in the u.s. as in europe – says a great deal about the people promoting it (including exactly how much they don’t listen to hiphop*), and absolutely nothing about the world around them.
—
* white folks in the u.s. love to project the things they don’t want to acknowledge about their deepest cultural norms into hiphop, against even the most basic evidence from the music itself; it’s interesting to see that it’s a transatlantic phenomenon, and that it’s been grafted onto pervasive anti-muslim and anti-immigrant stereotypes (which has also happened to some degree here, but because the xenophobia operates in a different context the usual crossfertilization is with anti-indigenous stereotypes used to target latinx communities: the media panic about MS13, for instance).
I think you’re right about all that, and I was (as usual) speaking sloppily and overgenerally in my offhand remarks about dive bars. I didn’t mean to say that I frequently heard insults like sonofabitch and saw resulting fights, just that there was a very distinct ambience in such places that would not be apparent from the outside. I agree that in dives “it might be a bigger insult in the abstract (and that’s partly why it’s an unlikely one to appear).”
I’m talking about a certain set of behaviours and attitudes, that has its origins partially in oriental culture and partially in American rap and “gangsta” culture, that is cultivated in a certain milieu and imitated by young people.
On this point:
https://youtu.be/3GLDRH0pW1A
Everyone is singing along. Lyrics here:
http://www.lyrics-24.com/lyrics,kiz-hurensohn.html
So many rap songs with the title Huresohn…
https://youtu.be/JtB7b_AuaWk
https://youtu.be/CuPkTXDZ5rY
https://youtu.be/pZw3a3GhJKI
https://youtu.be/ezzF4eOSYlM
https://youtu.be/p1WdyrkSiXc
https://youtu.be/NUDpBWuHOwg
Based on my experience and intuition, most bars, no matter how divey, don’t want people there insulting each other. Bar fights are a lot more common in movies (which concentrate on exciting anomalies). No bartender wants to clean broken glass or blood, and belligerent patrons are preferably taken outside while still vertical.
(I’ve only been twice to the Mars Bar in Manhattan. Enough to discover that anything, good or bad, could happen there. It was a magic place.)
I have no more connection to the German speaking underclass than Hans or DM but I did grow up in rural New Hampshire and went to public school among many people from the class of white Americans who preserve “traditional values”. And even in the 1980s, “son of a bitch” and “bastard” were not strong insults – more what you might say to a friend who had just pranked you. There were certainly running jokes about fucking other people’s mothers (or sisters) that I imagine could get heated in the right circumstances and with enough alcohol. But in small town New Hampshire to call someone’s mother a whore was something you only did if you meant it fairly literally (as in I know your mother and she is a slut who is sleeping with the school principal). As John Emerson says, the homophobic insults carry the real weight in that milieu, and that’s how you typically start a fight.
First things first…
I think this is a mistranslation that was consciously chosen to fit the constraints of dubbing and for no other reason.
In the other direction, that happens a lot. Or at least it would explain the many grave mistranslations where any better translation would in fact not fit what you can see.
I mean “culture” in an unusually narrow way, but definitely more than my family and my schoolmates. Like… I’ve never seen a stigma against single mothers, despite reading a lot about how prevalent it has been in other times and is today in other places. I’ve known children of single mothers, I’ve known conservative old people – nothing.
Oh, sorry for that impression. No, it really is just this one thing that has changed: lineage isn’t used as an insult anymore. If I wanted to start a fight with a random stranger, any number of homo-, trans-, xenophobic or ableist slurs would make it likely that the intended effect would overcome the weirdness of talking to a random stranger out of the blue.
(Some of these might actually not work with people younger than me. But my age and up? You bet.)
Still more effective, in a bar, would be to insult their football team. That might even get other people to join in.
That, though, can be interpreted as saying the intended target has unapproved taste or makes stupid decisions. It requires that ugliness is more or less objective, but it needn’t really be an insult to another person.
But insulting people’s identities by insulting their sports teams still works.
I have to caution that the American university experience, which makes it very easy to live in an academic bubble, is quite different from anything in Europe. The universities here generally don’t have a single bed on campus – if they even have a campus and not just individual buildings that are scattered all over the city. That doesn’t mean students necessarily live in the seediest part of town, but many do live in the cheaper places, and most spend a lot of time on public transport every day.
While I am at it, the bar experience is also different. As I just mentioned again, one does not simply talk to a stranger without a good reason. In Germany, a bar is where you go with your friends after work, especially on Friday or when there’s a football game on (they’ve all got big screens). You stay with your friends the whole time; you see other groups, but you don’t generally interact with them, even if you’re screaming GOOOOOAL at the same time.
(That’s the context in which I’ve been to an appreciable number of different bars in Berlin, most of them pretty often. Never seen a fight, even a purely verbal one, but I agree they’re probably just not common. Definitely seen a wide variety of people.)
Interesting.
Though actually, extrapolating from what little I know about hipsters in Berlin, they might actually consciously do that as historical reenactment, together with growing Victorian beards and naming their children Friedrich, Theodor or Josefine…
Rapping in German is a stereotypically Turkish activity.
The same holds for hiphop. The victims of xenophobia on this side of the pond empathize with the victims of racism on the other, and have adopted their means to express their struggles.
I should add that my dive-bar experiences are over two decades old now, and I have no idea what the current state of affairs might be.
Clifford Stoll’s book The Cuckoo’s Egg
I’m not sure if I met the term first in this title or in C.J. Cherryh’s novel Cuckoo’s Egg, published a few years earlier. In this story, an orphaned human baby is raised by an alien race, the hani, originally out of mere compassion, later as a scientific-cum-mystical experiment, and finally as an ambassador back to humanity, who the hani find frightening. In one sense the human child is a (voluntarily assumed) cuckoo’s egg in the hani nest, but there is a clear implementation that by sending a hani-thinking human back to Earth, the hani will have planted a cuckoo’s egg there. (It’s my second favorite Cherryh after Brothers of Earth.)
Ah, a Northeasterner.
Well, you are from Appalachia, which is one of the taproots of the “culture of honor” in the U.S. There are others, like the (quite Northeastern) Irish of Boston and Philadelphia and whatever was inherited from Africa or developed out of slavery, where lineage was quite literally everything. Such cultures arise where public order is unstable and the sense of being able to invoke a neutral authority is weak or nonexistent. This accounts for the Scottish Highlands, Ireland, Albania, Walterscottia, Gangsteria, etc.
One day in Penn Station after I had been riding the rails for 25 hours without sleep, I got angry with someone and (quite slowly) called him “you son of a bitch”. He didn’t hit me or even reply in kind: he called the cops! I apologized at once and when the cop came he took my interlocutor to the side and explained to him the facts of (second) nature.
The Cherryh novel reminds me of the Strugatskys’ Жук в муравейнике (Beetle in the Anthill).
” A Northeasterner”
The same way I’m German or Dutch. All of my ancestors were in Iowa by the time of the Civil War. I like to chat about my Yankee ancestors, but I knew nothing about them before I was 30. I’ve never even visited New England.
“A middleclass hipster bar is the easiest place to start a fight by specifically calling someone’s mother a whore – and a much more likely place for someone to do that.”
I don’t get this, and Portland has hipsters the way a dog has fleas.
Maybe you’d get “There’s nothing wrong with being a sex worker! All decent people should shun you. \\!”
Nothing I’ve read by Cherryh that she started writing after she finished high school has really impressed me, I’m afraid—but Gate of Ivrel is absolutely amazing.
@Kezban Mervelerden: Yep, that’s the kind of thing I was taking about.
@rozele: i’m talking about a certain set of behaviours and attitudes, that has its origins partially in oriental culture and partially in American rap and “gangsta” culture
and to me, this kind of explanation – which is just as common among middleclass white folks in the u.s. as in europe – says a great deal about the people promoting it (including exactly how much they don’t listen to hiphop*), and absolutely nothing about the world around them.
Look, I’m not judging, just looking at the world around me. Listen to the videos Kezban linked and tell me that the kind of insults we’re discussing aren’t typical for that kind of culture. They’re very consciously playing with that kind of language. That doesn’t mean they’re bad people or that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. My point is really just that certain things are linked to certain (sub)cultures, and that by doing these things you make a statement about identifying with or imitating that culture.