Kieuseyagare!

Victor Mair at the Log reports on an interesting Japanese compound verb that seems to be an adequate substitute for English profanity; he’s discussing this headline from “Japan’s hard-right, anti-China Sankei newspaper”:

「中国よ、消えうせやがれ」 フィリピン外相、“禁句”使って怒り爆発

“Chūgoku yo, kieuseyagare” Firipin gaishō “kinku” tsukatte ikari bakuhatsu

“Hey China, fuck off!” Philippines foreign minister uses taboo word in angry explosion

Mair writes:

The first three characters are the rough equivalent of “Hey China!” (“Chūgoku yo”). So far so good. It gets even better, though, because the delightfully nuanced verbal phrase “get the fuck out” gets translated as a compound of three verbs: “kie-use-yagare.”

The first two verbal stems are synonyms meaning “disappear,” though the contemporary uses of use(ru) tend toward the rude, i.e., “Get lost!” as command rather than simply get lost because you’re not in GPS range. Together, as the compound verb kieuseru, the implication is definitely and indelibly the former.

消える+ 失せる = 消え失せる

kieru + useru = kieuseru = “get lost,” “get outta here,” etc.

Semantically, then, the imperative kieusero would be enough to convey the meaning of “get out!” and perhaps even “get the fuck out.”

The addition of やがる (yagaru) is important, though. This is a verb that is only used as a suffix―often, as here, in the simple imperative. It is as rude as Japanese gets. It is perhaps best thought of as indicating mood or mode rather than meaning. And that mood ranges from disdain to hatred. It is the suffix you use to describe the actions of someone you actively despise. In other words, it is the emphatic, “the fuck” here.

I guess the takeaway is that because of its rich lexicon of verbs and verb forms for interpersonal relationships, this is one type of invective where Japanese can hold its own.

Jim Breen adds in a comment:

Interesting the see the compound verb 消え失せる being used very appropriately here. I’m quite fond of this 複合動詞 (fukugōdōshi) form; I even wrote a paper about them years ago: http://www.edrdg.org/~jwb/paperdir/jcv.pdf

When 消え失せる was first included in the JMdict/EDICT dictionary many years ago it had as one of its glosses “(in imperative) to fuck off”. Some years back that was removed as it was considered a bit strong. Perhaps we should revisit it.

See the end of the Log post for links to further discussions of Japanese swearing.

Comments

  1. Bathrobe says

    I’ve never seen this one.

    消えろ kiero, yes. The imperative itself is brusque.

    失せろ usero, yes.

    やがる yagaru as an abusive verb ending, yes. (Here again in the brusque imperative.)

    But not this magnificent 消え失せやがれ kieuseyagare.

    It’s to be expected that a language with exquisite degrees of politeness and honorifics would have rough derogatory language to match it. And the very fact that the polite language is so well developed means that the derogatory terminology is highly effective, without necessarily resorting to shocking language like “fuck”, etc.

  2. Yes, exactly, but it takes getting used to if you come from a profanity-rich language like English or (I bow my head in respect for the Ultimate) Russian.

  3. ktschwarz says

    I think that’s Nathan Hopson writing.

  4. Bathrobe says

    I don’t think that observation is unique to Nathan Hopson. Many people have noted the lack of strong profanities in Japanese, and the fact that “rough” verb forms take their place.

    Frankly, I’m not totally impressed with Nathan Hopson, although he’s Mair’s go-to man for intuitions about Japanese. Nathan strikes me as a person who is still discovering the language. He often gets things wrong (or hasn’t encountered common usages) and his tone seems to be wonderment at things he should really know. Of course he is perhaps good for LanguageLog precisely because of this.

  5. I bow my head in respect for the Ultimate) Russian.

    Yes, Russians are very proud of themselves, but for rhythm and expressiveness, combining both blasphemy and sexual vulgarity, I would still give 10 points to Mexican Spanish.

    Indeed, Russian insistence on the ugly sounding блядь instead of the more satisfying kurva should actually cost Russian points versus the other Slavic languages.

  6. The late Reinhold Aman thought Hungarian held the crown for nasty swearing. What I have heard of Hungarians swearing casually and good-naturedly in English makes me think he was right.

  7. i want to nominate québecois/acadien sacres for an honorable mention, because they manage to do so much with the fairly limited selection of ritual objects and other profanables available to catholics, and with so much reliance on simple sequences in “de”.

  8. Indeed, Russian insistence on the ugly sounding блядь instead of the more satisfying kurva should actually cost Russian points versus the other Slavic languages.

    I have the opposite reaction: блядь sounds like a real curse word, the other sounds like it should mean ‘curve’ and is no more satisfying to say emphatically.

  9. David Marjanović says
  10. David Marjanović says

    the other sounds like it should mean ‘curve’

    Conversely, Polish people can’t drive in Spain.

    and is no more satisfying to say emphatically.

    Remember that all vowels are short in Polish under all circumstances. Result: kurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwa with a quite satisfying trill.

  11. A first glimpse at Hungarian.

    That was classic!

  12. Remember that all vowels are short in Polish under all circumstances. Result: kurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwa with a quite satisfying trill.

    I can see how it could be made emphatic and pleasing; I still think blyad′ is far more curse-wordy.

  13. Conversely, Polish people can’t drive in Spain.

    In Romanian, converting the /b/ in the Romanian noun curbă ‘curve’ to a /v/ results in a Slavic-derived noun meaning what you would expect it to mean given its cognates in Slavic languages. I imagine this has probably led to some unfortunate incidents involving non-native speakers of Romanian, although I have not personally heard of or witnessed any.

  14. No time to review the deeper analysis of the Hungarian rézfaszú bagoly, but vigyen el is indefinite conjugation, so unless I’m overlooking something it seems like it’s actually “May the owl take me” (cursing self) or perhaps “May the owl take you” (cursing something).

  15. Many thanks for this post. For some reason, I’ve found the explanation of kie-use-yagare immensely satisfying. Pure pleasure.

  16. We aim to please!

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