Literally “go fuck”, it’s the basic “fuck you”, and the bread and butter of Hebrew insults.
Arabic, Russian, Yiddish, English, Ladino - Israelis take their insults where they can find them. A simple phrase like *Lech kibinimat, ya manyak *(“go to hell, asshole”) consists of four different languages.
Of course, some of the best Israeli insults feature no profanity at all. One of the most scathing ways of saying “fuck off” is *Lech chapess ta’chaverim shelcha *- “go look for your friends”.
Lun - literally ‘penis’ but has the effect of ‘fucking’ when inserted as a modifier, or into multisyllabic combinations, e.g. chi sin - crazy (literally ‘crossed wires’); chi lun sin - fucking crazy gum yat ho yit - it’s hot today; gum yat ho lun yit - it’s fucking hot today chau yuen - ugly (literally ‘stinky face’); chau lun yuen - fucking ugly
Diu - fuck Diu leh - fuck you Diu leh lo mo - fuck your (old) mother Die leh lo mo chao hai - fuck your mother’s smelly cunt
The above is actually relatively mild and you hear diu and diu leh lo mo spoken in the street constantly. More serious are:
Pok gai - fall down (unclear to me if this means ‘you’re the kind of person who would fall down’ or ‘fall down dead’)
Ham ga tsan - I curse all your family to death (this is the Canto nuclear swearing option)
Italian:
Puttana - whore, bitch
Cazzo (pron CAT-so) - literally penis, but is the ‘fucking’ equivalent, used in the sense of ‘fuck’, ‘fuck it’, ‘fucking’, ‘fuck me’ etc.
Whilst watching a DVD, when a character rips off a string of obscenities, I often rewatch the clip with the foreign subtitles. You know, just to keep fresh on the topic.
The Spanish “pendejo” is often translated as “asshole”. It actually means pubic hair.
And “cabrón” usually winds up as “bastard” though it is a derivative of the Spanish word for goat.
Readers old enough to remember Catch 22 by Joseph Heller know this. One of the main characters was Sgt. Scheisskopf (later promoted to Lieutenant, IIRC).
And why Swedish-speaking Finns swear in Finnish. “Och så va’ ja’ som voi vittu va’ han är saatana yks vitun idiootti”. Ours are just awesome, full of rolling R’s and vitrol. And, of course, the ubiquitous “vittu” (cunt), which in usage is approximately equal to “fuck” but then goes so much further.
Voi vittu = “oh cunt” = oh fuck.
Haista vittu = “smell a cunt” = fuck you.
Suksi vittuun = “ski into a cunt” = fuck off.
Vedä vittu päähäs = “pull a cunt over your head” = fuck off.
Mitä vittua = “what the cunt” = what the fuck.
Vitun XXXXX = “XXXXX of the cunt” = fucking XXXXX.
vittupää = “cunthead” = a stronger form of “asshole”
Olla naama norsunvitulla = “to have a face like an elephant’s cunt”= to be really sour and unpleasant about something
vituttaa = literally “to want/need cunt” = to be really pissed off about something
vittuuntua = literally “to become like a cunt” = to get really pissed off about something
vittumainen = “like a cunt” = shitty, unpleasant
And of course, “vittu” can just be used as an interjection to add force to a sentence, or sometimes to construct one entirely. One of the best ones I’ve heard is “Vittu mitä vittua vittu” by a very frustrated teenager.
Others:
saatana = Satan, used also in the form “saatanan XXXXX” which is approximately “goddamn XXXXX”
perkele = Satan (originally a pre-Christian god)
(“Vittu saatana perkele” is a popular string of swears.)
helvetti = Hell, “mitä helvettiä” = what the hell
paska = shit
kusipää = “pisshead” = asshole
kyrpä = cock (to be really pissed off at something is to have a cock growing on your forehead, “kyrpä otsassa”)
mulkku = cock, usually used to describe an unpleasant man
jumalauta = “God help” = approximately “God damn it”
perse = ass, “voi perse” = approximately “oh shit”
And combinations of the above: paskanvitut, persehelvetti… We get quite creative.
It’s que te jodan. They can be anybody, so long as they make it painful. There’s also que te folle un pez (may a fish fuck you… think about it: you’re screwed, maybe even pregnant, and given how fish have sex, didn’t even enjoy it) and its sisters, que te folle un pez espada or que te folle un tiburón (may a swordfish/shark fuck you… oral sex, given the choice of fishes)
Hecho una mierda. Like shit, not made of.
Both gilipollas and its sister soplapollas would translate directly to “dick-sucker”; that is, faggot.
But the literal translation “big goat” is not what the word means, bastard in the I’m-not-talking-about-his-parents-marriage-status-sense is very close to the actual meaning.
The Italians say va fa’nculo, we say que te den (po’l culo). Same thing, go take it up the ass.
Maricón used to mean faggot, but a curious consequence of the separation it’s experimenting between the sexual meaning and the unacceptable behavior meaning is that it’s now gotten a female version, maricona. Maricona has no sexual connotations, but it definitely has the unacceptable behavior meaning. And I’ve heard some people claim that maricón and mariquita are actually different: the first one (Mary-with) gives, the second one (Mary-without) takes; most people just consider maricón as the actual insult and mariquita (which also means ladybug, fun fun) as its euphemistic version which you would actually be able to use in front of your grandmother.
Mnd you: insults created on the fly, preferably with no actual profanity, are what’s considered the height of Spanish cursing. A Southern lady saying “bless your heart, darling” is much more to our liking than some yob going “fuck you fucker and this fucking fuck!”… seriously, baby boy, didn’t your momma make enough money under the streetlamp to send you for schooling, that you know a single swearword?
Although I salute the Finnish creativity when swearing, Northern Norway also holds its position pretty well, and is IMO a lot more colorful than imported English swearing.
It’s probably an urban legend that this message was found on the voicemail of the support center of one of the larger computer brands here, but it’s anyway a good example of good Northern Norwegian swearing:
Don’t ask me to translate, it’s quite untranslateable
Generally, Norwegian swearing has less emphasis on the scatological and incestuous words (e.g. motherfucker has entered Norwegian swearing only as a translation of the English term) and more on the religious terms. Terms like fuck, whore and motherfucker are rather uncommon in Norwegian swearing and are usually used in English by younger people who try to sound cool and can’t swear well. Also, the implications of “shit” in English isn’t commonly understood, because Norwegian “skitt” means “dirt”, not “shit” (“shit” is best translated with “dritt”, but even that word is IMO not as offensive as “shit” in English).
Some examples:
Faen - the Devil (often used as “fy faen”)
Satan - the Devil
Helvete - Hell
Faen i helvete - the Devil in hell
Satan i helvete - the Devil in hell
Faen brenne i helvete / Faen steike i helvete - The devil burn in Hell
Jævel - devil (originally a minor one, the Devil is “Faen” or “Satan”)
Jævla - devilish
Rasshøl - asshole
Jævla rasshøl - devilish asshole
Kuk/kukk - cock
Hestkuk (from the northern parts) - Horse’s cock (i.e. bigger than the usual one )
Fitte (most probably appropriated either from Finnish “vittu” or perhaps English “cunt”) - cunt
Drittsekk - sack of shit
Jævla drittsekk - best translated as “fucking sack of shit”
Jævla dritt/jævla møkk - best translated as “fucking shite”
Forpult - fucking
Slightly less offensive:
Herregud - Ohmygod
Fanden - less colloquial form of “faen”
Fanden og hans oldemor - The Devil and his grandmother
Skitt - crap (see above)
Typical Northern Norwegian swearing words:
Peis - Cock
Tykje - the Devil
Kuke - a verb derived from “kuk”
Faen søkke - the Devil sink
Utpult - fucked too much/too hard
Mainnsjit - shit (literally “man’s shit”)
Fett/Fette - cunt (also as an adjective some times)
Could be. Swedish cursing generally of invoking the devil. However we also use “attan” a variation av arton (eighteen) and “tusan” (thousand). So it could also be the number of devils we want to bring forth.
A friend of mine once opened a door in the iconostasis in the orthodox cathedral in Tallinn and surprised a priest who was siting there, reading a book. My then girlfriend, who knows Russian and was around, reported that he didn’t actually swear as such, but he was not far from.
One of the juicier Hungarian curses has an interesting history. In the time of the Turkish occupation the *lopat *was the stake upon which people were impaled. Hence: “lopat a segedbe” meant “(may you get) a stake up your ass.”
Over the years lopat fell out of use (the Turks were eventually driven from Hungary) and the homophone “lofasz” or “horse cock” took it’s place. So if your peeved at someone in Hungary, you wish that he gets a horse’s cock up his ass.
Interestingly, “con” – meaning cunt, and a cognate of it as well, just like the Spanish word – is also used in French, but almost never in the actual sense of vagina or vulva. It’s used as an adjective (there’s also the feminine form: “conne”) and is actually a very mild insult. It’s something you can affectionately/teasingly call someone you like, which would never be the case with the English word.
Good thing you said what it meant, because otherwise I’d have thought it meant Switzerland. Maybe Hell is in Switzerland?
There was a very funny story in a book my parents were reading- I think it was the biography of a prime minister. Begin, maybe? Anyway, whoever he was, he was giving a speech about the arming of various nations, and how he wanted to arm each and every Israeli citizen. Something like that.
Anyway, he was using the older, original meaning of zayin, weapon. So the younger people in the audience (which was most of them) were practically on the floor laughing, with only a few old people in the front clapping.
I have to confess that I have once exclaimed “Voi Jumalan vittu!” when someone overturned her beer glass onto my lap. My cousin who was there commented that he had never heard that expression before but he doubted you could say anything worse in the Finnish language.
Actually, I don’t know if ‘ty kravo’ is such a terrible insult. I guess it could be, but I’m more familiar with its usage to express surprise or bewilderment; it’s not really directed at anyone in particular but rather means something like ‘holy shit, look at that!’.
the pronunciation is pretty much as-is, except for the word that raskolnik represents as xye (?), which is close to what the Cyrillic looks like but completely random as far as transliteration goes; a closer approximation would be khuy, where the ‘kh’ is something like the guttural sound at the end of loch
I’m sorry, but swearing in Russian is pretty much like swearing in any other language. This is exactly the sort of bollocks that people who don’t really speak any other language than their own propagate about their own language. They have absolutely no way of knowing whether it is true, but they like to believe they’re right because it makes them feel special. As you can tell, though, I don’t buy it.
I speak three - Russian, Hebrew and English, and have a smattering (especially swear words) of others. And yes, Russian has the most elaborate system of swearing that I have seen. It is not “poetic” like Yiddish, nor very inventive, like Arabic, but it is the only language I know of where you can have a dialogue using ONLY swear words, and both people will understand what was spoken about (and the subject spoken about was not related to body parts, sexual acts, or effluents).
Example: here is a paragraph in Russian based only on words derived from the slang word for the male sexual organ:
“Na khuya ty zdes’ nakhuyaril do khuya? A nu raskhuyarivay na khuy!”
Which can be translated as: “Why did you pile up so much stuff here? Clear it up immediately!”
I’m sorry, but this example does not persuade me that Russian stands out, and saying “It’s the only language I know that…”, when you only know three languages, is just not convincing.
I fluently speak three. As I said, I am familiar with swearing in quite a few more. And you’re welcome to come up with an equivalent example in another language.
)