Fun Fact: Are you aware that Gaandu has be adopted into the Shanghaiese vernacular and means the same thing? seriously. There were Indians in the pre WW2 Shanghai that were bodyguards and such, and gaandu slipped into common vocabulary with the meaning unchanged.
Chana is another good one in Shanghaiese. Kinda “fuck you”
“nong nozi bq wu saporla” is my favorite Shanghaiese although it’s not so common. Literally your brain is filled with shit aka “shit for brains”
I have a friend from Lithuania. Are the two languages mutually intelligible enough that she would recognize this word, and be impressed that I knew it? 
I worked one summer with a first-generation Italian-American guy and discovered that it might be the most beautiful language for swearing. Plus, it’s got nice hard consonants.
Thanks, everyone (and please keep them coming)! These seem like the most likely to get incorporated into my repertoire; for this English-speaker, I think simplicity is the key to a good exclamation.
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Fuckin’ A!
I have no idea if any of the below are, in fact, commonly used in these languages. But, that said:
“Zut alors!” (French for “Damnit!”)
Also, things I learned from reading X-Men:
Bozhe moi! (Russian for “Oh my god!”)
Was zum Teufel? (German for “What the devil?” / “What the hell?”)
Well he has, actually, as he claims that no language lacks swear words. But that is true of Irish. There are no individual words that are unusable. I mean, a long postulation on the subject of feces would be as unwelcome at an Irish dinner table as anywhere else, but there is no equivalent for “shit.”
This calls for a bit of creativity, almost always involving the devil and various actions he might take with the offensive object or person. The most common is probably “diabhal a chur air” which is simply just “Devil take it.”
The worst I’ve ever heard was a simple aside in a conversation about an ex-girlfriend “is féidir leis an diabhal ream a asal” (the devil can ream her arse) said in the same under breath way one might say “May she rest in peace” mid-sentence when discussing a late friend.
I’ve also heard cúl tóna which doesn’t translate literally at all, but is used much like “dickhead.”
One I’ve seen written but never heard used is “Gabh Transna Ort Fhéin” which means “go sideways with yourself” but is understood like “F*** yourself sideways.”
Stugots! The Neapolitan pronunciation of the Italian slang sto cazzo, meaning “my cock”. Thanks to The Sopranos for that one.
according to Dave Barry, “zut alors!” is French for “Look! A lors!”
Where I live, one is rarely called “cabrón ”. It is nearly always “¡Pinche cabrón!”
I am looking for Arabic!
I believe that phrase can also mean “what a dick” depending on the context.
If you mean in the sense of being amazed by a dick, for example because it’s a particularly beautiful one, then yes. But you can’t call a person a dick (cazzo) in Italian. In that case use, “che testa di cazzo”, I.e “what a dickhead”.
Also popular is the originally Sicilian “minchia” (pronounced “minkia”) with the same meaning and use as “cazzo”.
In Dutch the English “shit” has become so imbedded in the language that it’s the first thing that would come out of my mouth if I stepped on a piece of Lego. Otherwise I might go to various forms of “God damn it” such as “Godverdomme”, Godver or even Godverdegodver. I’m hearing that last one in my father’s voice.
yeah… supposedly when the Costa Concordia ran aground and the captain bailed, someone in the Italian coast guard yelled “vada a bordo, cazzo!” (“get on board, dick!”) at him.
Then I was mistaken, thanks for the tip (no pun intended). Although I wonder why it works for dickhead but not just dick.
I read one translation that rendered it as “get on board, for fuck’s sake!”
That’s correct. “Cazzo” is an expletive here, it doesn’t refer to the captain. I don’t get it either, but in Italian you can call someone a dickhead but not a dick.
This is my go-to.
Funny side story: we’ve hosted high-school students from China and Germany several times, typically for 2-3 weeks at a time.
Last year, we agreed to host a student from Germany… and about a week later I found out I needed fairly painful wrist surgery.
The surgery was accomplished before she arrived, but I was still in a lot of pain while she was with us. So she heard my one German word with more regularity than I like to admit.
She corrected my pronunciation :D.
I don’t find that “merde” has nearly the explosiveness that sudden, shocking pain requires.
the literal meaning is “genital hair”. It is derived from pender, “to be hanging down; to droop”.
In Spain puto doesn’t necessarily imply that he caters to gays, but chapero does. From chapa (cap as in bottle-cap), slang for coin.
I’ve had this one wrong for years, then – had always interpreted “pendejo” to self, as “someone who ought to be hanged”. (I basically don’t know Spanish, so could have been on more than one wrong track.)
Well, the official version is that it already meant pubic hair in Latin, but I find that many Spaniards find the unofficial version easier as a learning aid:
From Latin *pectinicŭlus, and this from pecten, -ĭnis ‘pubic hair’.