Pardon my French... (notam.uio.no/~hcholm/altlang/stat.html)

Member Name: Rumblefish

Product:	notam.uio.no/~hcholm/altlang/stat.html
Date:	04/10/00 (141 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very funny...and quite educational.

Disadvantages: Unlikely to entice you to visit it more than once or twice.

WARNING: This opinion contains explicit language.

This website is a comprehensive source of swearwords and obscenities across numerous languages, from English to Esperanto. It includes confirmed spellings, phonetic pronunciations, definitions, examples of usage, and occasionally brief histories.

Initially you are faced with a long list of languages, most, but not all (they've yet to scour the Bengali or Mongolian dictionaries for example), are links to a list of swearwords and obscenities in that tongue. Some only have one or two examples (the only Gujurati obscenity on view is "Chootio" meaning "dickhead, jerk"); others have hundreds.

You may at first do nothing more than raise an eyebrow at the long lists of strange and beautiful words and phrases that actually turn out to mean something deeply offensive. But what makes the sight funny rather than just odd are the written accompaniments to each obscenity, which veer between earnest academia and deadpan humour.

For example, since "naida" in Finnish means both "to marry" and "to have sex with", you are warned, perhaps somewhat unnecessarily, that "this verb must be used with caution". Similarly the Arabic word "Cus" meaning "Fuck you" should only be utilized "if you are looking for a fight in a Middle Eastern bar".

More interesting still are the little snippets of info about the words and the phrases and the curious insight they provide into other cultures. In Quebec the phrase "swing la bacaisse dans l'fond d'la boite a bois" (meaning "swing the fat lady at the bottom of the wood box") is "often said when you see a big lady in a big party" (it is?). Whilst you may or may not be interested to know that in Poland the word "suczka" meaning "little bitch" is in fact "a term of endearment", and in Macedonia, "go
mno" meaning "shit or poop" is used as "a compliment".

Also well worth reading is the English section (which reassuringly has by far the most entries), in which John and Mary are used to illustrate usage and definitions ("Mary found crabs in her pubes"; "John is being a shit today"; "Neither John nor Mary are into pecker cheese").

As is often the case with this kind of website, you are struck not just by the amusing but otherwise fundamentally useless content, but also by the mere fact that someone has obviously devoted so much time and effort into putting it together - and you tend to believe the author when he accompanies "kosto", the Basque word for cannabis, with the rejoinder "I wish I had some on me now!!!"

Well worth a look then, although perhaps unlikely to be a long-term resource. Then again, should you be holidaying in Latvia, and are called a "padirsenis", you can pop over to this site and learn that you were in fact being called "the one who stinks of shit, because he used to shit in his pants".

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