Each language seems to have developed their own interesting culture-specific ways of cursing. Consider, for example, the extremely versatile work "fuck" in English language. In addition to the purely sexual meanings, it can be used to express, among other things, resignation ("Oh, fuck it!"), trouble ("I guess I'm fucked now."), aggression ("FUCK YOU!"), Disgust ("Fuck me."), Suspicion ("Who the fuck are you?"), Directions ("Fuck off.").
Cursing is something that is usually not taught in language courses and lessons, so it takes some time in a realistic language environment to start getting grasp of the bad words. Chinese is very polite language and Chinese are polite people, so it is no wonder that swearing in Chinese language usually involves clever disguises and alternate expressions. Jinlin in particular is very polite (perhaps too polite?) in her correspondence with me, but she sometimes posts messages and status-sentences on QQ social network that show more natural Chinese slang. Some time ago when she was outraged about one of her university study-mates being robbed on street in Shanghai, she posted:
The first layer of disguise involves the usage of western characters that act as initial characters of the underlying Chinese words pinyin. In this case the underlying Chinese is 他 (Tā) 妈 (Mā) 的 (De), therefore the letters T, M and D. What's the meaning of those? 他 (Tā) means "he", 妈 (Mā) means "mother" and 的 (De) is possessive suffix, so the meaning is "his mothers".
Not so bad, huh? Well, now comes the second layer of disguise. Turns out that the three-letter curse leaves the critical first and last character away from the full five-character curse. The full sentence is:
The subtle tonal variations of Chinese language also provide endless possibilities to disguise swear words. For example, in todays slang, you can tell your fellow Chinese to go fuck their mom by saying "Alpaca" in Chinese. Alpaca, as we know is a small Llama-like animal of South-America.
So how is this possible? In Chinese Alpaca is called with a literal meaning "Grass mud horse". "Grass" is 艸 (cǎo), "mud" is 泥 (ní) and horse is 马 (mǎ), so pronunciation for Alpaca is "cǎo ní mǎ", which is just few innocent tone changes away from "cào nǐ mā" which is 肏你 妈 meaning "fuck your mom". How convenient ;-)
Cursing is something that is usually not taught in language courses and lessons, so it takes some time in a realistic language environment to start getting grasp of the bad words. Chinese is very polite language and Chinese are polite people, so it is no wonder that swearing in Chinese language usually involves clever disguises and alternate expressions. Jinlin in particular is very polite (perhaps too polite?) in her correspondence with me, but she sometimes posts messages and status-sentences on QQ social network that show more natural Chinese slang. Some time ago when she was outraged about one of her university study-mates being robbed on street in Shanghai, she posted:
想不到 TMD 什么 上海 ? 还有 抢劫 ?
xiǎng bu dào TMD shén me Shàng hǎi ? hái yǒu qiǎng jié ?Literal word-by-word translation for this is: "Unexpected TMD something Shanghai? Also robbery ?" The interesting part of course is "TMD", inserted with western characters in middle of the Hanyu sentence. As was revealed by my later chat with Jinlin and interesting article on Chinasmack site, this turns out to be a doubly-disguised swear-word.
The first layer of disguise involves the usage of western characters that act as initial characters of the underlying Chinese words pinyin. In this case the underlying Chinese is 他 (Tā) 妈 (Mā) 的 (De), therefore the letters T, M and D. What's the meaning of those? 他 (Tā) means "he", 妈 (Mā) means "mother" and 的 (De) is possessive suffix, so the meaning is "his mothers".
Not so bad, huh? Well, now comes the second layer of disguise. Turns out that the three-letter curse leaves the critical first and last character away from the full five-character curse. The full sentence is:
肏 他 妈 的 屄
cào tā mā de bī肏 (cào) means "fuck" (in the sexual sense) and 屄 (bī) is "cunt", so now after the deciphering we have "fuck his mothers cunt". Fluent readers or listeners can infer this from the seemingly innocent letters "TMD" :D
Fucking Alpacas
The subtle tonal variations of Chinese language also provide endless possibilities to disguise swear words. For example, in todays slang, you can tell your fellow Chinese to go fuck their mom by saying "Alpaca" in Chinese. Alpaca, as we know is a small Llama-like animal of South-America.
So how is this possible? In Chinese Alpaca is called with a literal meaning "Grass mud horse". "Grass" is 艸 (cǎo), "mud" is 泥 (ní) and horse is 马 (mǎ), so pronunciation for Alpaca is "cǎo ní mǎ", which is just few innocent tone changes away from "cào nǐ mā" which is 肏你 妈 meaning "fuck your mom". How convenient ;-)
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