A reader wrote: “As a lover of swearing, perhaps you might like this link for the blog: Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin.” And so I did! Colin Morris’s post begins:
Dirty words are, let’s face it, a lot of fun. If you want to express your dislike for someone and a standard insult like “jerk” or “moron” won’t cut it, you can get creative. There are a few reliable recipes for forming derogatory noun-noun compounds in English. For example:
• Start with a word for a disgusting or worthless substance
• Add a word for an agglomeration or containerHence, dirtwad, scumbag, pissbucket, snotwagon…
The introduction ends “If only we had some concrete data on how these pieces fit together…”; Morris continues:
I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains […] As a corpus, Reddit has the virtue of being uninhibited in its profanity, and on the cutting edge of new coinages. For example, Google Books Ngram Viewer, which indexes the majority of all books published in English up to 2019, gives no results for fuckwaffle, whereas the term has been used in 1,096 Reddit comments.
The full “matrix” of combinations is surprisingly dense. Of the ~4,800 possible compounds, more than half occurred in at least one comment. The most frequent compound, dumbass, appears in 3.6 million comments, but there’s also a long tail of many rare terms, including 444 hapax legomena (terms which appear only once in the dataset), such as pukebird, fartrag, sleazenozzle, and bastardbucket.
Check out the Matrix of Pejoration, the discussion of flexible and inflexible affixes, and odd lacunae (“Butthead is common, so why are asshead and bumhead so rare? Why does buttclown fail where assclown succeeds?”); it’s all fun and informative. Thanks, Ryan!
“O, container of worthless substance!” (старик Хоттабыч-style)
That’s Butthead as in “Beavis and”. Without him, you’d expect asshead as an unfiltered insult, and it would probably be much rarer while (the attested) assface would be as common as in Viennese.
Again, as an unmitigated insult you’d expect assclown. The only way buttclown could surpass it would be if could be turned into an allusion to Butthead.
Trumpface seems pretty harsh …
“Beavis”
According to google n-grams, butthead was already ahead of asshead in 1986 and rising.
So presumably for the creators it was a new fashionable word.
“Trumpface seems pretty harsh …” as I said, the problem with Trump, Obama, Yeltsin, Putin etc. is that if you do not ignore wars, they are not different.
Barack Hussein Obamaface?
they are not different
This is a difficult argument to maintain in any detail …
It’s actually something I hear quite often on the doorstep when campaigning: “They’re all the same …”
They’re not.
The question to ask is: Who stands to gain by making you think they’re all the same?
It’s actually quite an easy question to answer, once it’s been posed.
Of course, if you ignore not only wars but domestic policy, personal probity, criminal behaviour and a few other things, yes, they are all the same.
Butthead was, if not as old as the hills, in common use long before Mike Judge’s Frog Baseball. For example, calling people “butthead” was a tic of Biff Tannen starting in Back to the Future, Part II, released in 1989. It was presumably chosen because it sounded like an uncreative, dim-witted insult.
It is also interesting that the matrix’s two most common compounds with –bag are (not surprisingly) scumbag and douchebag. Notably, both of these were terms for literal containers before they became generalized terms of abuse. (The next most common –bag is dirtbag, which probably came to prominence as minced version of scumbag, notably being used in that was on Hill Street Blues. Moreover, without the existence of dirtbag, it looks like dirt– probably wouldn’t even have made it in.)
@drasvi: I realize you are not familiar with all the finer subtleties of American politics and governance, but throwing Obama in with those others is an error of staggering scale—wars or no wars.
Bumboris.
…I’m surprised (having checked with the count list, and confirmed with the code) that they apparently include cunt as a suffix (which I can’t think of any examples of) but not as a prefix (which is AFAIK fairly common). It would surely have made more sense the other way around. Maybe I (or someone else here?) should add that as an issue in the Github.
(They have pussy as prefix-only and twat in both categories.)
Oh! That must have helped.
@Brett
If Obama immediately stands out to you, of those four, then you must not be sufficiently familiar with Yeltsin.
I suspect drasvi is not focusing on perceived placement on a sliding good/bad scale but making a point about world leaders in general. (In which case I feel the same way.)
I take it his Reddit dataset is not coded by geographical origin of user. Such a coded dataset would be useful because some combinations sound to my ear much more likely to be used by a BrEng speaker than AmEng speaker and perhaps there are others that would strike a BrEng ear as Americanisms. But it would be good to test that empirically, and it’s also possible that the dynamics of online pejoration are such that a particular pejorative that an American would never thought to have coin might, once coined, be seized on by (some) Americans for actual use.
Harry Potter and the Matrix of Pejoration …
I’m rather surprised that “asshole” is not at the top of the list. It may be a Northern California thing, or a generational thing, or perhaps even the fact that my L1 isn’t (wasn’t) English, but I can’t think of hearing or reading any combination more frequently than “asshole” or its euphemism “a*hole”. What’s with that?
@DE, what about Putin? Is the war just a minor detail? If so, then not for Ukrainians.
I do realize: rulers, while being free not to start a war are expected to do it by the society (voters, political establishment or both). Just as Roman rulers.
But
Q1: what exact weight I should give to “military operations” by yet another ruler (compared to domestic policy)? Apart of “ignore, if not ignore”, how can one account for this properly?
– a formula in the spirit of “Mao is 60% right 40% wrong”?
– explain wars with “mores” and focus on a leader’s talents?
– study her motives?
I suspect when you live in Iraq you don’t give a shit about domestic differences between Bush, charming Obama and ugly Trump. And you and Brett are not going to understand each other. I don’t think this difference never occured to you, LH, and Brett.
All of these gentlemen and Putin too influence the situation in many countries and are willing to use military force to do it. If their actions there matter less, then because what? Because the Middle East matters less?
Would acting like this in Cardiff be worse?
So we can resolve the problem by declaring that people in these regions are just less important.
Or we can decide that people in countries far away are always mere cartoon characters. An Iraqi for Brett, Brett for an Iraqi. Not ‘less important’, just “mutually less important”.
Or we can decide that these people are just ingorant. But that’s bullshit.
Q2: what is the proper way to deal with this?
What I object to is the impiication that all politicians are morally much the same. If I have misinterpreted you, and you aren’t implying anything of the kind, accept my apologies.
I am a politician, in the sense that I took part in the founding of a political party and campaigned (for someone else) and I find the distinction between “politicians” and “not politicians” bizzare. Aren’t we all politicians?
@DE, I do not know if I am implying this.
Iceland does not bomb people. Trump, Obama, Putin and Yeltsin did.
As I understand you do not have an answer to my Q1 and Q2.
@V:
In a democratic state, I think (pace Hat, who disagrees strongly on this point) I think that political involvement is a civic duty for all who are actually capable of meaningful involvement (which is not everyone.)
In reality, though, I don’t think we are all politicians, except on a very general reading of “politician”; more’s the pity. This view of mine (and yours) is not that of the majority.
Furthermore, in much of the world, meaningful involvement in politics takes courage of a kind I do not possess (and may expose relations and friends to danger), unless you side with the ruling gangsters; to be apolitical in such circumstances is a positive virtue.
@drasvi:
I have plenty of answers to your Q1 and Q2, but I don’t think the discussion is likely to be particularly illuminating, and don’t propose to be drawn into it in detail. All I want to do is to say that our various politicians are not all morally the same (a despairing and false doctrine); I am not interested in whitewashing any individual, much less any individual policy. I don’t think my views on the Iraq war are known to you (though they are actually pretty usual among left-wing Labour party members, and should be guessable. You seem to have guessed wrong.)
What I object to is the impiication that all politicians are morally much the same.
I think it is fair to say that politicians who span the entire Overton window in their domestic policies are often much more of a muchness in their foreign policies. For one thing, they are less constrained: as countries are in a state of nature with respect to one another, force, fear, and fraud prevail.
Yes, I think that is (sadly) a fair assessment; though your “often” is an important qualifier there. It is (thank God) not always so.
David: Yeah, that’s basically it.
@DE, reading your answers would be interesting.
If you remember my original comment, I wrote: “the problem is”. For me it is a problem. I do like Yeltsin, for example, but the Chechen war is a huge catastrophe.
As for Iraq – no, neither Obama nor Trump started the war. They are just similar in their actions in the ME – and both changed histories of countries. Without answers to Q1 and Q2 I do not consider the game of praising one and hating the other ethical.
Anyway: I just sighed and explained why. You do not have to give your answers. And I merely was sharing what I feel and I did not think about a “discussion”:/
“I don’t think the discussion is likely to be particularly illuminating, and don’t propose to be drawn into it in detail”
Not different from how political discourse is generally structured. I mean, a Russian won’t praise or criticise Putin for his efforts in Africa.
Let’s say, possibly there is more difference between Putin, Yeltsin, Obama and Trump and us their voters than there is between Pol Pot and Hitler.
Possibly.
Depending on the answers to Q1 and Q2 which DE has a plenty of – and which I have not ever seen seriously discussed. Who knows.
“In the course of hiring the Marine recruits, we interviewed hundreds of guys,” Kubrick told Rolling Stone. “We lined them all up and did an improvisation of the first meeting with the drill instructor. They didn’t know what he was going to say, and we could see how they reacted. Lee came up with, I don’t know, 150 pages of insults.”
Inventing those insults wasn’t particularly difficult for Ermey – he was just being a drill sergeant, this time on camera.
“My main objective was basically to just play the drill instructor the way the drill instructor was and let the chips fall where they may,” Ermey said in a History Channel interview. “You can ask any drill instructor who was down there in 1965 or 1966, that’s exactly how the drill instructor’s demeanour was. There were no punches pulled.”
Those insults effectively launched Ermey’s varied career. He appeared in a wide range of television shows and movies, including Se7en, The Simpsons and the Toy Story movies (in which, naturally, he voices a plastic green army man named Sarge).
https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/how-r-lee-ermey-created-his-memorable-full-metal-jacket-role-20180417-h0yuym.html
“Se7en”
I find the transcription 7 for ح very useful and now it is difficult to read se7en other than Seحen:(
“I don’t think my views on the Iraq war are known to you (though they are actually pretty usual among left-wing Labour party members, and should be guessable. You seem to have guessed wrong.)”
@DE, you misunderstood me:( I know the opinion of European left on both Iraqi and Afghan war well (I even once objected that Afghanistan – Taliban – started the war first). What I wrote only reflects my own confusion.
@drasvi
Your Q1 and Q2 are general questions in ethical philosophy and you seem to assume that political actors can decide on and implement a course of action with complete freedom. In the past, even when the actors were (or were advised by) expert diplomats, they were at times unable to collectively prevent an outcome that (they knew!) would be bad for them personally, for their social class and for their country. Just consider the failure to prevent the Crimean War or WW1.
It’s 70 : 30, heretic. Now you can never go to China!
By that criterion? Nowhere near. I’m sure very few of present company have taken part in the founding of a political party* or in any political campaign. I’m sure that very few of us outside the US** are even members of a party.
* …admittedly that means more in some countries than in others. In France, a new party that makes it into parliament is founded every few years; in Austria every decade maybe; in Germany every quarter-century; in the US more like once in 150 years.
** In the US, party membership consists of being registered in a state as a voter in that party’s primaries, which are run by the states and not by the parties. The parties can’t do anything about who is a member and are not even specially informed.
In the case of WWI at least, some of the actors actually believed the propaganda they had grown up with: that war is good and necessary on occasion.
“you seem to assume that political actors can decide on and implement a course of action with complete freedom”
I assume this:
In the case of WWI at least, some of the actors actually believed the propaganda they had grown up with: that war is good and necessary on occasion.
Who are you thinking of? I’ve read a great deal about the origins of WWI and as far as I know it was only generals who felt that way among the “actors” (by which I assume you mean the people who could actually order troops to move, not blathering hacks in the press, who generally don’t believe anything except that getting papers sold is a good thing). Such propaganda definitely existed, but I don’t believe it was a majority view anywhere — most people, then as now, very much prefer peace. The tragedy is that they’re so willing to embrace war as soon as their stupid, feckless leaders decide to start one.
rulers, while being free not to start a war are expected to do it by the society
This is simply untrue, and I have no idea why you think that.
@Languaghat, which part? (PP questioned the former, “being free”)
Eduardo, I suspect that “asshole” is so universal (and has such an obvious physical referent) that it’s no longer perceived as a compound.
which part?
The part about “the society” (which I take to mean the majority of people) allegedly expecting rulers to start a war.
This is War-and-Peace Second Epilogue stuff. It’s not totally false: more a matter of degree. At its least implausible end, it merely shades into PP’s point that political actors are much more constrained in what they can actually do (or refrain from doing) than they themselves are prepared to admit (certainly to others, and even to themselves.)
And it’s at least less false than the Great Men of History crap beloved by authoritarian bastards themselves. (Tolstoy himself is pretty explicit there about wanting to cut Napoleon down to size. A sort of anti-Raskolnikov. Gotta sympathise with his motivation, at least …)
Both emperors, plus Hindenburg & Ludendorff. They were totally deluded.
It’s not widely known, but Francis Joseph the First and Last* had a thing for the military of downright Prussian proportions, starting with sleeping in a field bed every night.
* Amazingly widely called the First during his lifetime and I suppose for the first two years that followed.
I can confirm that for a lot of Austro-Bavarian dialects, where the two vowels of the obvious German calque have switched places. The only explanation I can come up with is that children keep learning this word from each other long before they figure out it’s supposed to have any meaning other than “evil person” – and indeed before they hear of uncompounded arses, because those retain the switched vowel they have in the compound.
Both of these are even carried over into Viennese mesolect.
Both emperors, plus Hindenburg & Ludendorff. They were totally deluded.
Not true; you’re confusing military cosplay with a desire for war. From David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer:
If you’re not actually an officer in the military (in which case of course war is your reason for being and your chance for promotion), you have to be mad to want war, and few rulers, then or now, are actually mad. Beating your chest and liking parades, that’s a different matter and much more common.
I don’t think that holds as a general rule before the advent of industrial warfare. As long as politics was determined by rulers and an aristocracy that obtained a large part of its legitimacy from conquest and that needed to obtain the support only of a small part of society, war was a rational choice. Part of the tragedies of the 19th and 20th centuries came about because that mindset took time to catch up with the realities of modern industrial mass warfare.
That’s variably true for different meanings of “mad”.
That, on the other hand, I can’t see in turn-of-the-century Europe.
The reason that the Falklands Special Military Operation saved Margaret Thatcher’s unpopular government was that it was clear that the Labour Party leadership at that time was not in favour of war; while this is not the same as Thatcher starting a war to court popularity, the dynamic is not altogether dissimilar.
Wars safely far from home conducted by professional military are naturally more popular than other kinds, of course.
(This was also the very last occasion on which a British government minister resigned as a matter of principle. Où sont les neiges d’antan?)
The parties can’t do anything about who is a member and are not even specially informed.
Not specially so, but voter registrations, which include party enrollment, are in most states publicly available (but not all the items on the registration form are public). State-by-state details.
you have to be mad to want war
Not at all. For example, the Indian annexation of Goa from Portugal was not an act of madness on Nehru’s part: he had war goals, he achieved them decisively with minimal casualties on either side.
True, but that’s an unusual example. Usually it’s clear there are going to be lots of casualties and significant economic destruction.
Erich Maria Remarque said that the enthusiasm for war among German teenagers depicted in Im Westen Nicht Neues was, if anything, toned down r/compared to what he had actually witnessed in 1914.
an aristocracy that obtained a large part of its legitimacy from conquest
That, on the other hand, I can’t see in turn-of-the-century Europe.
No, that was earlier. But the mindset was still there.
@LH: I’ve read accounts that come to different results than Fromkin. At the minimum, the rulers of Germany and Austria didn’t think of war as something to be avoided at all costs; there are also interpretations that they gambled on being able to have a war at their terms. And at least in two countries for which I have read up on the history of the run-up to WW I, large parts of public opinion*) were eager for war; one is Germany, the other is Italy, where the government actually wanted to stay out and was pressured into entering on the side of the allies by a campaign driven by D’Annunzio and other public figures.
*) Which isn’t identical to the overall population; but in both countries large parts of the bourgeoisie and of intellectuals were gung-ho for the war.
I’ve read accounts that come to different results than Fromkin. At the minimum, the rulers of Germany and Austria didn’t think of war as something to be avoided at all costs
Sure, but that’s not what I’m arguing against. Obviously if rulers thought of war as something to be avoided at all costs, there wouldn’t be wars. My point is that they’re not eager for war. And yes, many bourgeois and intellectuals were gung-ho for war, but such people have loud barks and little influence on events. It takes top-ranking government people telling the generals to mobilize the troops, and that’s generally done with reluctance; such was the case in the run-up to WWI, except arguably in the case of Austria-Hungary, which thought it would have a splendid little war against Serbia with Germany to hold its coat.
Yes, that’s why I said “specially”.
I find it stunning, BTW, that nobody (in most states) seems to have worried that making party membership public would invite discrimination by employers etc. etc….
nichts
Definitely, but that has no bearing on whether the people who had the pro-war propaganda made believed it themselves.
The reason that the Falklands Special Military Operation saved Margaret Thatcher’s unpopular government …
(I was in Britain at the time.) What struck me as most remarkable was that those who were most gung-ho hadn’t heard of the Falklands only a few weeks before/couldn’t place it on a map/didn’t know there was a bit of Empire still left off the coast of South America.
And didn’t care a hoot when only a few years later, a much better known and more significant piece of Empire (Hong Kong) got cast adrift.
Similarly Gibraltar was abandoned because of other Tory priorities (and they’re even white-skinned).
This was also the very last occasion on which a British government minister resigned as a matter of principle.
Indeed. Talking of a British Minister as even having principles, let alone being guided by them, seems like a different age entirely.
I assume David E.’s reference is to Lord Carrington’s resignation as Foreign Secretary. The standard account seems to be that he resigned because the unanticipated-by-his-ministry Argentine invasion tended to suggest to cynical observers that he and/or those under his supervision were incompetent. I’m not sure I would call resignation for (actual–or-perceived) incompetence in office “a matter of principle,” but it is certainly plausible that there is some historical nuance I am overlooking. And no doubt there have been manifestly incompetent U.K. cabinet ministers who did not feel obliged to resign.
During the embassy-in-Iran hostage crisis, the U.S. foreign-secretary-equivalent (Cyrus Vance Sr.) resigned, not so much because of his incompetence in office (although his efforts to resolve the situation via his preferred strategy had failed) but because he had been excluded from the decision to try (unsuccessful, in the event) military intervention because others in the administration didn’t want him involved in the discussion and the then-President (probably to his discredit) went along with excluding Vance. That can perhaps be pitched as a matter of principle (no one who holds the office I hold should, as a matter of the proper functioning of the government in good order, be excluded from that sort of decision-making) rather than merely personal pique at having been marginalized.
The standard account seems to be that he resigned because the unanticipated-by-his-ministry Argentine invasion …
Yeah these things are never simple. My understanding was Carrington and his Ministry thought the Argentines could be pacified and reasoned with. So the ‘failed principle’ was jaw-jaw-jaw. (That had worked in the case of Rhodesia.) The first invaders, it seemed, were some sort of covert operation not officially sanctioned by the Argentine government — or was that merely plausible deniability?
OTOH, by 1982 was Carrington so p***ed off by Thatcher and her acolytes selling off the family silver that he wished a pox on’t?
@LH, I wrote it as an explanation of “Obama, Trump, Putin and Yeltsin” above.
I think Obama and Trump were strongly affected by what is expected from presidents and by other politicians.
Bush also was expected to respond to 9/11.
David E.: [Lord Carrington in 1982 over the Falklands War] was also the very last occasion on which a British government minister resigned as a matter of principle.
Robin Cook in 2001 over the Iraq War?
@PP, as a person you always can choose to act differently. Not to give an order, not to approve someone’s decision.
There are complications. If you act differently, it may lead to destruction of your country or some other disaster. Sometimes people miscalculate it: they enter a war and their actions only lead to escalation.
But it is easy to point at situations where the very goal of using force is evil from my perspective. In this situation it is your decision and you are free not to do it – but the goal is not necesarily your own.
Obviously if rulers thought of war as something to be avoided at all costs, there wouldn’t be wars. My point is that they’re not eager for war.
I once had a neighbour’s little boy looking over my shoulder when playing a computer game, and he would shout “attack! attack!” whenever a unit played by the computer came in sight. I agree that most rulers don’t show that level of eagerness. But for most of history that wasn’t because of any aversion to war, but because war means effort and cost, and has to be prepared. Most rulers for most of history were quite ready to go to war when the calculation seemed right, and as we all know there were empires based on periods of extended, constant conquest. As for WW I, all sides had built up their armies in the decades before, in most countries there was a jingoistic public opinion, and whatever attempts there were to limit the extent of the war (e.g. keeping out the English), the decisions taken were not those of someone who really didn’t want a war. Germany could have told Austria that it was on its own; it could have not invaded Belgium, and it could have, at a minimum, avoided entering the naval rivalry with Britain and stoking flag-waving jingoism in the decades before. Those were all parts of a position that allowed and approved of war, even if the resulting world-wide conflict perhaps wasn’t what Germany wished for.
Robin Cook in 2001 over the Iraq War?
Yes indeed. A much better example, too. I have something of a blind spot over this on account of an inability to keep the words “Robin Cook” and “principle” in mind at the same time. (I knew his wife slightly.)
What I meant (but indeed did not in fact say) was that Carrington was the last to resign because he took responsibility for failures on his watch which cannot really be laid at his own door, on the grounds that that is the right thing to do. (The Modern Way is of course to throw some underlings to the wolves instead. “I was only giving orders.”)
It may be significant that Carrington (like William Whitelaw) had seen active service as a (personally courageous) soldier. Such people rarely have the enthusiasm for war that lifelong civilians do. They know much more about it. (They also tend to be unimpressed by the idea that an officer’s failures can be excused by the poor quality of his men.)
I find it stunning, BTW, that nobody (in most states) seems to have worried that making party membership public would invite discrimination by employers etc. etc….
The default position is that employees are hired and fired at the employer’s will (which once upon a time was part of the definition of serfdom), therefore for any reason or none. Indeed, “none” is the safest position (someone who claims not to act rationally cannot be attacked for behaving unreasonably; see below).
Therefore, exceptions have to be carved out one by one: race or color, religion, sex (which includes for this purpose gender identity and sexual orientation), and national origin. To create a new protected class requires sustained effort to change legislation, win court cases, and create a groundswell of public opinion, none of which is easy. However, state and local governments can and do add more exceptions. California, which has an economy larger than (pre-war) Russia, has an explicit ban on employment discrimination by reason of political belief or action. A few states have generic protections saying an employer cannot discriminate by reason of any off-premises lawful acts.
So a sign saying “We don’t hire liberals/conservatives because they are obviously incapable of rational thought, a requirement for all our jobs” is on its face legal. However, no corporate lawyer would fail to discourage this, because an aggrieved would-be employee might go to court and create a fifth protected class.
(Employees of federal, state, and local governments have special protections because the First Amendment, which does not apply to the actions of private employers, does bind public employers because they are governments.)
(I knew his wife slightly.)
Quite so. Yet no few of his public acts were clearly matters of principle, particularly in brokering compromise between the UK and Iran over the Rushdthat is the right thing to doie affair and the agreement that led to the Scottish Court in the Netherlands, and he certainly stood to gain nothing (except reputation in certain circles) for bringing Scots law on homosexuality in line with English law.+
Besides, how many people have the wit and force, when participating in a debate moderated by David Dimbleby and being called “Robin Cock” in the course of a question, to reply “Yes, David Bumblebee”?
that is the right thing to do
I am far from certain that it is. We no longer expect captains to go down with their ships (if indeed we ever did), though we still condemn those who abandon their posts during an evacuation. He who fights and runs away, etc.
…no, it’s still British, or what do you mean?
A glorious copy-&-paste error, the likes of which have not been seen since the cdesign proponentsists.
Gibraltar was abandoned
…no, it’s still British, or what do you mean?
I mean that despite Gibraltar voting overwhelmingly to remain within EU, UK Govt/people have made no special efforts to cut a better deal for them. (Of course Spain is interfering — that’s just a negotiating position.) Contrast the tergiversations over N.Ireland.
Why would Gibraltar need a better deal? AFAIK, they basically kept the status they had and are now part of Schengen?
Having grown up in New Hampshire during the Reagan years I believe most young men prefer war to peace as long as “we” are beating the crap out of “them”. Young men have always been enthusiastic about fighting. This is why sublimating those instincts through organized sports was a huge step forward.
I have to dispute both of these claims. Enthusiasm about fighting is to a large extent cultural (you even mentioned Reagan). It’s even been found that testosterone doesn’t make people more violent – it makes them more likely to engage in status-seeking behavior, which for men used to be violence and still is in places. On organized sports… “in soccer you can get rid of almost all the aggression you build up in soccer”, wrote Ephraim Kishon, and I think he’s right.
@dm
I think the argument for organised sport substituting for or ameliorating the need for violence is supposed to apply more for the spectators than for the players (who apart from a gifted few are too tired to participate in post-match violence). There is of course a very disruptive minority that goes to matches with the specific goal of starting or engaging in fights with other supporters….
…and a very large majority that only watches the games on TV, but spends the next week being angry about their own team because they played so badly or the umpire or any combination of these plus coaches, organizations and so on.
El Salvador’s “football war” wasn’t launched by players.
Enthusiasm about fighting is to a large extent cultural (you even mentioned Reagan).
Fair enough, but I agree with Brett that there really was a lot of enthusiasm among European young men in 1914 for “war”, even if it was culturally determined. Wars and revolutions are also quick ways for young men to jump the queue to higher social status, especially in rigid hierarchical societies, so it is not necessarily irrational hormones.
On the peculiar sociological identities of sports fans.
Re cultural-specific determinants of modes of violence, the extremely common European phenomenon of the “soccer hooligan,” organized into large and semi-stable groups going out and looking for trouble is essentially unknown in North America, not just because soccer is historically a fairly marginal thing but because none of the major team sports have generated a similar phenomenon. Seeing, at age 17, the scene outside a stadium* where a Bundesliga game was to start in an hour or so, with rival gangs in “colors” (that would be the U.S. 1%er motorcycle club equivalent – I don’t know the German word) sort of clustered and eyeing each other and waiting for the trouble to start was possibly the most bizarrely alien thing I saw in a summer spent in West Germany. I mean, apart from the ubiquity of and social tolerance for topless sunbathing by teenage girls, but I rather laudably thought I should be broadminded and cosmopolitan and not condemn the locals for that.
*Home team would have been Werder Bremen; not sure 40 summers later who the visitors were, esp. because I want to say “Borussia something” which apparently does not narrow it down to just one candidate.
Oh, so do I (as mentioned above). It was really quite hard to imagine from a modern point of view. (And it wasn’t limited to young men at all, but of course only the young men thought they were going to fight in it.)
“Soccer is the sports of the future, and always will be.”
Indeed. Maybe the young male fans are all too busy watching the cheerleaders? I have no idea.
I don’t think there is one.
However, farbentragend “color-wearing” is associated with Burschenschaften – student organizations that came out of the revolution of 1848, some stiflingly conservative (i.e. liberal by the standards of 1848), some nationalist-fascist (several have been banned for being Nazis). Most of what they do is ritualized beer-drinking not all that different from an American frat, but some of the nationalist ones – self-designation schlagend “beating” – engage in fencing where the goal used to be (until some 20 years ago) to get a visible scar in the face as proof of bravery.
The US seems to be catching up in the form of the Proud Boys, who feel (and state explicitly) that there isn’t enough physical violence in daily life in these decadent days, so they want to start some.
The “ubiquity” part seems to have quietly disappeared. There are official and inofficial nudist beaches, and you can see topless young women tanning their backs in a random park on occasion, but…
Nope.
@J. W. Brewer, in the 1982-1983 season Werder Bremen played Borussia Mönchengladbach on 31 August at home. Their other Borussia * games were at the wrong time of year (not summer) or not at home or both.
Estelle Morris resigned as Education Secretary in 2002 because she didn’t think she was up to the job, if that counts as a matter of principle. Robin Cook resigned in 2003 — had it been 2001 it would have been a matter of precognition.
A necessary condition for football hooliganism is that gangs travel to their teams’ away matches. Perhaps this is less common in the US, where the distances are much larger at the top-level leagues, and the provision of special match-day trains for fans is somewhat patchier.
biker gang : outlaw motorcycle club :: hooligan gang : ultras firm
The “ubiquity” part seems to have quietly disappeared.
A rare case where the internet is really to blame.
mollymooly: Robin Cook resigned in 2003 — had it been 2001 it would have been a matter of precognition.
Yes, of course. And he was no longer foreign secretary, but had some other position.
There are Hells Angels and Mongols in Germany, but so few they hardly ever make it into the news despite the violent crimes that they do commit.
Interesting – you mean teenage girls don’t want topless photos of them to be distributed worldwide?
@Craig. Vielen Dank. I had not thought to consult the internet (which of course would know exactly that sort of thing), but I was back in the U.S. by August 31 so I now see it must have been Werder Bremen’s Aug. 21 home season opener against Bayern Munich. And that was a day game rather than evening game, which fits my memory of the pre-game sense in the streets of “potential energy” as to inter-gang violence just waiting for a catalyst to be discharged being around lunchtime.
Mollymooly’s excessive-distance-and-travel-time-to-go-looking-for-trouble-at-away games thesis about U.S. pro sports sounds plausible, but in the olden times (major league baseball before 1958) the median city-pair of teams playing each other was closer to each other than Bremen and Munich are, although I guess that was in those days one of the most distant city pairs in the Bundesliga (Hamburg-Munich is farther as the crow flies but I guess I’m not sure if it’s further as the Deutsche Bahn runs). The NFL was mostly similarly geographically confined to the Northeast/Midwest to avoid teams being obligated to take multi-day train trips for road games in those pre-jet-airliner days, although it made its first leap to California somewhat earlier than baseball did. Although I guess I don’t know how long ago railroad-facilitated traveling soccer hooliganism as we now know it arose in the U.K. and other European nations. Definitely by the 1970’s but how much earlier than that?
Tolerance for topless women always seeming to be a positive development to me. Actually, any sort of tolerance of nudity, but specifically I never associated “topless women” and (their or mine) sexuality. The prototypical situation when I wanted teenage girls to be topless as a teenage boy is when it was hot and I was topless and was about to advise the same to my freind and realized that “oops”.
Accopordingly what symbolized a bad development for me is less tolerance for topless men (in USSR and early Russia it was quite acceptable for men to appear topless on city streets. ).
—
” the crow flies” – the weird thing is that for JWB a “crow” is a different animal from what I know as a “crow”:/
Oene of our ministers wanted to kill crows “because they are city wolves”. He failed, but they succeeded at killing dogs, so maybe – in the spirit of my Q1 and 2, it is why I must hate them (ministers, presidents, and people)
wanted to kill crows “because they are city wolves
It seems they never learn.
В конце июня 2003 года Кабинет Министров Узбекистана принял распоряжение об «изьятии» из природы птиц майна. В соответствии с правительственным документом предполагается истребить за один охотничий сезон 952 тысячи особи афганских скворцов. Всего же, даже по приблизительным подсчетам узбекских ученых общая численность майн в Узбекистане составляет около 1,4 миллиона. Повторим, приблизительно, потому что ряд известных орнитологов страны считают, что этих птиц гораздо больше – примерно полторы – две особи на одного человека. Таким образом, только в столице страны их может быть до трех миллионов.
https://www.fergananews.com/articles/1989
«Отстрел майн признан безрезультатным и бесперспективным», — так ответили мне на вопрос о продолжении акций по отстрелу этой птицы сотрудники Управления заповедников, национальных природных парков и охотничьего хозяйства Главного управления лесного хозяйства при Министерстве сельского и водного хозяйства Узбекистана.
Напомню, что толчком для начала отстрелов послужили жалобы об объедании ею садов и виноградников. В начале лета 2003 года вопрос о майне обсуждался в хокимияте Ташкента. В июне же было принято соответствующее распоряжение Кабмина, а в дополнение к нему – «Положение о порядке изъятия из природы птиц «майна». В Узбекистане за охотничий сезон намечалось изъять свыше 952 тысяч особей. В приложении указывалось, что общая численность по Каракалпакстану, областям и Ташкенту составляет 1360 тысяч. Изъятие составит семьдесят процентов.
https://sreda.uz/rubriki/bio/majna-pobedila-oxotnikov/
Well, it was Онищенко. Back then “главный санитарный врач страны”, but his job was mostly foreign politics: that is, Moldavia would elect a wrong guy and he would find something in Moldavian wine and ban it.
Then Putin and Saakashvili have a brawl and he finds something in Georgian wine.
As Moldavia was the main wine importer AND because it coincided with a major excise tax reform (new electronic system of regisration of excise stickers – it just did not work, that is, it did not work, but it was already required…) it was a Summer Without Alcohol. For me especially because I prefer wine.
The the system worked and Russians learned to drink French, Italian etc.
Later he also run the internet censorship agency. But in the middle he said we need to kill crows.
—
I like them, I mean, I do notgive a shit whether it is practical or impractical. But despite the title “санитарный врач”, he did not really explain why. “City wolves” sounds more like an insult (what, he does not like wolves?). I assume if I love them then someone can hate them. Killing someone who is not a human is allowed, so this someone can kill animals.
And then when this someone works in government and especially at this position he can propose to kill them all…
Fortunately, we have Putin.
Нет истины в вине. Но нет её и в водке.
JOS ei viina, terva ja sauna auta
70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”)
English forms like “cherry tree” remind Russian suffixes (vish-nya), but they are somewhat different semantically, of course: Russian does not have a suffix with a meaning “-head” for example.
Yet we can try combinations of Russian prefixes and suffixes without roots.
pri-ló , pod-yúk…
Feels like I need a consonant. Pribló!, podlyúk!
They are not “prefixes” and “suffixes” in the sense that Russian uses (and in general as linguistic terms). The closest think in Russian is сложное слово (compound word). The examples from the matrix are (as far as I can figure out) what is called exocentric compounds (the meaning of the compound doesn’t resemble the meaning of either part). I did not find standard terminology for the parts of the compound words. Russian “-head” can be a “suffix” (second part) in a compound, пустоголовый comes to mind.
@D.O., as I said: cranberry, cherry tree, …man, … fish, …book correspond to Russian “uchébnik” etc. A variety of suffixes similar to English -er, -ness etc., sometimes with additional shades , e.g. “forms mass nouns” or as -ló and -yúk are rude/expressive.
Functionally tree etc. are suffixes in some ways.
Butthead has a literal reading though (and egghead especially).
Let’s say, Engish compounding is not the same as Russian compounding.
Both English and Russian make use of building chains of morphemes, but in Russian the morphemes are a variety of suffixes (while compound words are mostly literary) while English does it to nouns and a possibility of reading it as a phrase remains.
Russian also has deverbal compounds: нищеброд, самолёт.
Strategies are in part similar (chains of parts) and partly differnet (a suffix vs. a noun). Results are often functionally identical: textbook, coursebook, uchebnik and this convergence is not necessarily due to natural needs of speakers, for there is contact.