Like a trooper

Lan­guage teach­ers tend to shy away from the fact that prob­a­bly the hard­est part of per­fect­ing any for­eign tongue is know­ing how to eff and blind in it. For ex­am­ple, in Cata­lan, it's not enough to know that cony refers to a what the co­me­dian Sarah Sil­ver­man likes to call lady parts; be­cause you also need to know how to slip this word into your con­ver­sa­tion cor­rectly, ei­ther as an ex­pres­sion of baf­fle­ment: què cony et passa? ('What the lady parts is wrong with you?') or in order to stress your anger: estic fart de tu, cony! ('I'm fed up with you; lady parts!'). Once you've mas­tered that, you can progress to the de­riv­a­tive terms conyàs ('a se­ri­ous prob­lem') and de conya ('per­fect'). When we get on to col­lons ('balls') things get more com­plex. In a heart­en­ing in­stance of sex­ual equal­ity, col­lons can be used ex­actly like cony, to ex­press ei­ther baf­fle­ment or anger. The de­riv­a­tive col­lonut ('won­der­ful') should not be con­fused with acol­lonit ('ter­ri­fied'). De col­lons in­di­cates suc­cess: és un artista de col­lons ('He's a fan­tas­tic artist') but dels col­lons stresses neg­a­tive at­trib­utes: és un pesat dels col­lons ('he's ex­tremely bor­ing'). And so forth: the on­line Cata­lan com­edy por­tal 'Acu­dit' gives 38 dif­fer­ent uses for col­lons alone. Eng­lish, of course, can turn the air blue just as flex­i­bly. In his cam­pus novel 'I Am Char­lotte Sim­mons', Tom Wolfe points out that the word 'shit' can be an ad­jec­tive ('shit-hot') or an ab­stract noun ('get your shit to­gether') or a verb in­di­cat­ing de­cep­tion ('you're shit­ting me') and so on, with a total of 29 dif­fer­ent ap­pli­ca­tions (not in­clud­ing the orig­i­nal mean­ing of 'ex­cre­ment')

Much the same could be said of the F-word and the C-word. The prob­lem is that for years now, it's be­come a habit for na­tive speak­ers to lay these swear words on with an un­nec­es­sary large trowel. The other day, for in­stance, in Barcelona's Museu del Dis­seny, a man in the graphic de­sign sec­tion yelled to his girl­friend (who was stand­ing right next to him): 'No shit, that's a moth­er­fuck­ing rip-off of a Michael Beirut poster!'. When she de­murred, he bel­lowed yet an­other ear­load of for­ni­ca­tion and fae­cal mat­ter at her. It's as if such Anglo-Amer­i­can tourists are all try­ing to play per­ma­nent bit parts in 'Reser­voir Dogs', trot­ting out four-let­ter words at the drop of a hat to an ex­tent that – pre­cisely be­cause they are not being di­rected by Taran­tino – can just be down­right ir­ri­tat­ing. In short, this kind of gra­tu­itous curs­ing has be­come a conyàs full of col­lon­ades per­pe­trated by a bunch of tor­ra­col­lons. Enough is enough, cony!