# What language(s) do you swear in? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 5, 2020, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226 "2020-05-05T20:51:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![brachyrhynchos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/brachyrhynchos/32/376_2.png) [@brachyrhynchos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brachyrhynchos)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2020, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/41 "2020-05-07T20:43:30Z")
Finnish English ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2020, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/42 "2020-05-07T21:05:59Z")
English, Afrikaans and Fanagalo. ---
**Author:** ![Bookkeeper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bookkeeper/32/281_2.png) [@Bookkeeper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bookkeeper)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 5:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/43 "2020-05-08T05:39:40Z")
English and French. (Sometimes Russian - it’s almost the only Russian I know.) ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 6:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/44 "2020-05-08T06:24:33Z")
Spanish, English and Catalan with occasional forays into French and Italian. I’d like to learn Russian so I can curse in it, I hear it’s a good language for cussing. I once spent 8 and a half weeks working in Italy and after 6 weeks or so the Italians were very proud of my ability to insult someone in Italian fluently. I’ve lost the skill but I’m sure I could regain it quickly. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 10:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/45 "2020-05-08T10:50:03Z")
My wife and I use “pakinggan” a lot. It means "listen to me’ in Tagalog, where it is pronounced “fucking gun”, and gets attention. Go to Google translate, Romanian, and type in “fac eu”, which means “I do”, and listen to what the pretty lady would say at the altar. ---
**Author:** ![polar\_bear](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ec9cab/32.png) [@polar\_bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/polar_bear)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/46 "2020-05-08T15:28:16Z")
I assume she would just say “da”, even if she would use the verb to do (which is just weird)…Just “fac”. Incidently, I swear a lot in Romanian. Verstuurd vanaf mijn moto g(6) met Tapatalk ---
**Author:** ![LurkMeister](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/3da27b/32.png) [@LurkMeister](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LurkMeister)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/47 "2020-05-08T16:07:51Z")
When I was working I would occasionally get so annoyed at coworker/public stupidly that I needed to vent, but I worked in a cubicle farm so there was a good chance that doing so would offend someone. Since I didn’t speak anything but English, I usually resorted to cutting loose with nonsense syllables which sounded vaguely Celtic/German/Russian. It was cathartic without running the risk of anyone realizing what I was thinking. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/48 "2020-05-08T16:56:31Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > \How potent is “Verdammte”? I ask because it appears to translate as “Damned” or “Damn it” and those are fairly light as English curse words go, well below the F word, but not uttered in church. For that matter, is “Scheiße” equal in strength with “Shit”, which is a notch above “Damn” on the mom-will-wash-your-mouth-out-with-soap scale?\ > [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > “Verdammt” itself is very mild, even church going ladies would utter “Verdammter Mist”, with “Mist”, meaning “dung”, far more milder than “Scheiße”. I’ve often heard the theory that German swear words are rather prone to relate to excretions than English ones that tend to be rather about sexual things, because of different social taboos. I don’t have any clue if that is a sound theory. I see that I forgot to explain the impact of “Scheiße”. It’s much like “fuck” in English, the standard go-to expletive, similar in potency, but not as tabooed as “fuck”. I’ve never heard or read “das S-Wort” (the S-word) for instance. Even my mother, who’s the opposite of a vulgar person, would shout a suppressed “Scheiße” if she cut her finger or something like that. In general, one can say that swearing and swear words are much less tabooed in Germany than in the US, I think the main reason for that is that (almost) nobody understands swearing as a sin in the religious sense. ---
**Author:** ![Mark\_Finn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@Mark\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mark_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 8, 2020, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/49 "2020-05-08T23:44:34Z")
Often in (Quebec) French: here’s the primer: [Quebec French profanity - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity) ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/50 "2020-05-09T00:54:52Z")
Primarily English, with a smattering of French, and several nerdy sci-fi words: - Kriff, kark, and pudu (Star Wars) - Frak and felgercarb (Battlestar Galactica) ---
**Author:** ![Zeldar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b77776/32.png) [@Zeldar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeldar)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/51 "2020-05-09T00:58:00Z")
So, is anybody going to “fess up” to using Carnac? At least tell us what that is? ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [May 9, 2020, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/52 "2020-05-09T03:05:59Z")
For you youngsters: Way back in the day, the Tonight Show was hosted by Johnny Carson. One of his standard bits was [Carnac The Magnificent](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4GduUWv-mA&t=329s), Seer, Sage, Soothsayer, Knower of All Things. Whenever he got peeved with the audience, they would get “May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!” or “May a diseased yak squat in your oatmeal!” or something of the sort. Definitely Level 1 on the insult/swear scale. ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Zappa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/71e660/32.png) [@Mama\_Zappa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Zappa)\ **Post date:** [May 13, 2020, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226/53 "2020-05-13T16:04:56Z")
English all the way, except that somehow “scheisse” has become my go-to for many purposes. Which is strange, as I have never studied German, nor spent much time around German speakers (except as noted below). I do speak a fair bit of French, but “merde” just does NOT have the same explosiveness in the mouth that makes many Anglo-Saxon words so satisfying. So we used to host short-term foreign high school students for 2-3 weeks at a time. Spain, Italy… then Germany. About 2 years back we committed to hosting a girl from Germany, and about 2 weeks after agreeing to do so, I found I needed somewhat urgent wrist surgery that involved some tendon transferral and some work on a bone. Which of course was… a little painful, during the recovery. Poor kid heard my one word of German a bit more often than I’d have liked 😃 She was cool about it, even helped correct my pronunciation - turns out I was saying it like “shyss” and it’s more like “shyssa”. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-language-s-do-you-swear-in/853226.md?page=2)