Re: Vulgarity

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Sally Caves wrote:


> Oh, it was stuff like (in T.) you "pus puddle," "you venereal disease,"
> "you monkey dog's diseased penis."  You know, I can't even give you
> the stuff in original Teonaht... it's still too private!  It was my
> area where I could be completely secretive.  But it would be fun to
> make up some new ones (those I gave are just approximations), sort
> of on the order of what someone did once on a list that had me
> LOL:  I'm sure most of you have seen it.  They gathered a list of
> Shakespearean adjectives in one column, Shakespearean present
> progressives in another, and Shakespearean nouns in the third column.
> To "insult" someone, you drew at random from all three columns:
>
>         You injurious pond-scuzzling pud, etc.
>
> It would be fun to draw up such a list for Teonaht.  Or any other
> conlang.
>
I don't know - isn't this really more like invective? And witty
invective isn't vulgar, at least not in my book. It's the
humourless reiterations of unfounded aspersions on the virtue
of ones opponents parents that are so tiresome and vulgar...
But then, my alma mater has always had a subscription to _Maledicta_.

In the play 'Hamal'Pulandir ginad kramok' mama-yolunlohir t'aya',
there's a bit invective where a girl tells a suitor that he's
'got wrinkles on his brow like the foreskin of an old diseased
rat[1]', while his breath reminded her of manure-pit of a famous
unhygienic king. He looked like a 'scarecrow from the Farmer's
princedoms', his manners were those of a barbarian from the far
north, and to cap it all, he stank of fat. Unfortunately, I never
got as far as this passage in my Broyan original translation...

This in the meantime gives a pretty good idea of what's vulgar
in Charya - having no manners, stinking, being dirty. What's
also vulgar is not using enough classical expressions in your
prose, or using too many colloquial expressions in your daily
conversation. Being too gaudily painted (although that's relative,
Charyans paint large parts of their body as a matter of course.),
furniture that's too elaborate, bothering people who want to be
alone, having murals that are too gaudy. I'm sure that there
are dozens of other vulgarities the Charyan equivalent of 'our kind
of people' will never commit.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt

[1] In this respect the Teonimh and the Charyans seem to be on
the same track...