Back in the 80s, a book was passed around the office that listed Japanese swear words and insults. Their take on insults was very creative and funny. Naturally, we all used them on each other, until management finally stepped in to put a stop to it. I've looked for the book since, but cannot find it.
On an unrelated note, when I was working on the C++ compiler back then, Zortech C++ had the option of presenting error messages in Japanese. There weren't many obvious Japanese translations for technical terms. C++ "destructors" in Japanese turned into "death tractors".
Sometimes I still get caught referring to destructors as death tractors.
The normal Japanese word for a programming destructor is still just English-borrowed "desutorakuta," so the legacy of the death tractor lives on.
Here's a very similar online conversation which you were a part of on the D forums/newsgroup, about a D book being published in Japan. [1] That's page 2 where it's first mentioned, and your joyous reaction is on page 3.
Seems like at the time since Google Translate didn't know the term in its programming context it tried its best and gave back "death tractor" when trying to take "desutorakuta" back to English. Today though it gets it right (see "table of contents" tab in this link) [2].
That thread so matches what you're describing here, I wonder if it's the actual source?
Ha, well sure, with Google itself not existing for another decade or so, I would have to agree with you there.
My suggestion was rather that this 2004 event was actually when you first encountered the "death tractor" round-trip translation, not in the 80s. I won't belabor the point since obviously you would know much better than I would.
I just found it amusing to find such an exactly matching thread, still easily accessible. And as you say, "death tractor" is good in any decade.
Japanese profanity is difficult to translate literally. For example, there are verbs that encode grades of respect ("to eat" can be any of meshiagaru, taberu, kuu) plus verb conjugations that express contempt (yaru > yagare), so you end up with phrases like kuiyagare that on a literal level mean "eat" but would need to be translated "Fucking eat!".
In the other direction, you can't map English cursing word by word either. "Asshole" may be ketsu no ana, but the listener would hear that as "buttocks opening", not a personal insult. Which is not to say there aren't scatological insults in Japanese, kusottare (lit. shit-dripper) being a personal favorite.
In Melbourne, Australia we sometimes refer to them as "Toorak Tractors" as Toorak is considered a suburb of Melbourne mostly populated with people that have more money than brains.
Following the link for “wankpuffin” (beautiful word, btw), apparently the one-syllable followed by two-syllable construction is a distinct pattern, called a “shitgibbon” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shitgibbon)
Noun
shitgibbon (plural shitgibbons)
2. (linguistics) A type of antibacchic compound word used as an insult, consisting of a single-syllable expletive, followed by an absurd or innocuous two-syllable noun as a trochee.
Also,
> a special tank you enter to jerk off.
feels rather insulting to me. It’s not exactly something I would want to be associated with.
While true, it seem it still applies to SUVs. The Porsche Cayenne is big. The Silverado/Dodge RAM trucks are bloody stupid big : a combination of SUV and Yanktank.
The mind boggles when people go to a "support the environment" rally and then jump in these to go home...
I know it is predominantly Industry we need to look at regards environmental damage but personal responsibility has to step in somewhere.
The shitgibbon definition is surprisingly specific about the metric composition of the pejorative compound, indicating that it must be antibacchic, which means two stressed syllables followed by an unstressed. So "assmonkey" and "twatwaffle" fit the bill, but common forms such as "asshat" and "dickwad" do not.
Trumpet seems to be the only musical instrument that's used as a pejorative. Why not "assclarinet" or "drumtwat"? Is it because the trumpet kinda sounds like a fart [full disclosure: trumpet player], and if so why not trombone or tuba, which sound much more like farts to my ear. "Ass-tuba".
On a related note, there was a short-lived punk band in the 1980s called the Butt Trumpets.
The link above to the definition of shitgibbon specifically says that the second word should be a trochee (first syllable stressed, second unstressed). I do think "tuba" works better than "trombone".
But I also think that consonant clusters probably help. "banjo"? I think homophones probably dilute the effect so "organ", "cymbal" are out.
It took less than a week to Baader-Meinhof on this. Dutch has klootviol, "ballsviolin". But why that particular chordophone in both languages?
How about our Germanic language? "fiddle" is synonymous and has the proper metre. A regex dictionary search finds "bumfiddle(r)", which is only coincidentally close to "assviolin", having come from one of the other senses of "fiddle":
I feel like this captures only the novice redditor troll. Those who advance to the next level don't merely use "shitlord" or "assclown" but instead combine the two for increased effect. Call is a second order compound pejorative, e.g.:
That's the kind of comment I'd expect of some shitlord assclown who doesn't know where their opinion stops and reality begins. Get out of your mom's basement and maybe you'll upgrade your personality to piss stain
I don't speak from experience on levelling this sort of insult though so I may not have got it quite right. I welcome both constructive & unconstructive criticism of my technique.
If you're really good friends with a somewhat crude Australian, he might call you a cunt. It's a term of endearment.
But cunt might also be used as a serious insult.
Entirely depends on context.
There's also a creative arabic language insult, or variation on it, that can be translated as "my dick in your religion" or "a thousand dicks in your religion"
Eastern Europeans have some of the best insults, too. Hungarian has "A horse's dick in your ass." (Lófasz a seggedbe.)
I believe it is the Serbs who use "May the Pope fuck your 18th-great-grandmother." (How the Pope shall choose which one of the insultee's 524,288 candidate ancestors, that's not clear.)
The famous "Go fuck yourself" directed at the Russian warship by the Ukrainians translates, literally, even better: иди нахуй (idi nahui) = "go to dick".
> How the Pope shall choose which one of the insultee's [...] 18th-great-grandmother
Interesting question, and I could immediately propose:
-- that the subject ancestor availability on earth is considered a possibility, as they may be implicitly supposed to procreate at first biological occasion;
-- that the identity of said ancestor must crawl the female side of the chain, as "mater semper certa, pater numquam", especially supposedly in the case of the insultee.
Yes, хуй can also be used with в instead of на, so the ‘on’ is better than ‘to’. However, we could combine the two to be even more accurate and imply the motion: ‘go onto dick’. We can also improve the translation by adding an article: ‘go onto a dick’.
Alternatively, we can make a slightly more idiomatic translation by fiddling a bit with the verb: “get on a dick” is my favourite version of this, conveying the meaning well without sacrificing too much accuracy.
I had read somewhere that the altered line was intended to be read "no-talent-ass clown", but Herman read it as "no-talent ass-clown", and a fantastic insult was born. That part could be apocryphal though.
Careful with using these terms on reddit as reddit is increasingly moving to machine learning based distribution of bans and post removals, use of any obscure words (particularly pejoratives) is more likely to get a ban from our humorless machine overlords.
(meanwhile, hacked nudes and posts of judges home addresses with 'violence isn't the answer. it's the question and the answer is yes' "doesn’t violate Reddit’s Content Policy")
I have in the past been told that overt calls for racial genocide do not violate Reddit's content policy.
It is taking time but I'm trying to find replacements for reddit that either don't pretend to be moderated or are anti-crimes against humanity in their moderation.
They annoy me slightly, I think the reason is people clearly put effort into coming up with "hilarious" combinations and then try to pass them off as a spontaneous product of their strong feelings. The real internal response was probably a boring combination of the same old words and maybe some now banned ones from school you can't fully shake.
It's like the tumblr trend of suddenly switching to caps partway through a word, the verbal equivalent works but I know you're proofreading your posts.
I haven't heard that term used since Richard Cheese sang a parody song with that title on the Opie & Anthony show over 15 years ago. Not linking it here since the song is extremely offensive but YouTube is your friend.
actually sorry to be pedantic but it's legomenon not logomenon, it's a participle of the verb λέγω, "to say", not λόγος (reason), which I'm assuming explains the mistake.
If there are any non-native English speakers reading this, please do not use any of these words. No reasonable adult in the Anglosphere actually talks this way. You'll come across extremely "soy" if you break any of these out in everyday conversation.
Weirdly, neither 'jesus' nor 'christ' appears in this list. While reddit's obviously hugely popular internationally, I'm assuming there's some North-American cultural impositions, de facto or de jure, in play. In my small circle there's a lot of compound expletives that include one or the other.
We can trace back some common expressions of surprise or frustration to this character's name / title - crikey, jeepers, gee, I'm sure there's more - but I suppose those are both sufficiently linguistically distanced to be safe, and in the context of TFA somewhat anachronistic.
On reflection nothing as sophisticated or delicious as two of my favourites -- twatwaffle or cockwomble (only the former got a mention in TFA). Typically it'd be Jesus followed by one of the stronger profanities - especially that one that Americans seem to be surprisingly sensitive about, but which Australians will exuberantly drop on a whim.
To wit - while the f-word appears ~ 14 times in the article, the c-word is notably absent. (EDIT: actually it's there, once, in a PNG, which is why it didn't come up on page-search.)
Referring to TFA's matrix, it looks like only a handful of potentially comfortable combinations that could use this fictional character's name against the suffixes and prefixes they've identified -- but they would feel a bit contrived.
The top two [1][2] of the "missing gems" list have already been added to Wiktionary, probably as a result of this being posted to HN, since those entries were created today (30th) and the article is dated to two days ago.
Looks to be a common typo when spamming the words. E.g., "Shit shit shitshit shit shit". I wouldn't be surprised if that's the source of many of those.
I don't know what shitshit is, although Y Combinator probably funded it if the founders were young enough and seemed to know how to talk to rich people.
Thanks to this, I'm going spend literally an hour trying to figure out the rarest of these I've actually used. I'll be shocked if I don't score at least one single-digit.
I have a couple guesses as to what it would be, but don't want to dox myself, because they're usages that are still in the early stages of catching on.
I wish there were some way to survey people based on age (maybe account age as an imperfect proxy?) to see if there are any generational hot-spots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-HHiPCivVg
I feel like I have probably called someone a "trumpfuck" at least once. Really almost all of them work IMHO: "Shut up, you trump-ass trumpnugget! Take that trumpshit back to /r/trumpstains, you trumpwaffle!" I don't think trumphat or trumpwit really quite have it, though.
Also I feel like this chart is inspiring me to experiment the next time I'm in the kinds of discussion where these compound words get used.
(And also, remember that "trump" is UK for "fart".)
> I'm not British so I can't speak to local usage but I have never seen that usage online
It's a _little_ old-fashioned, but in fairly common use. Probably in more common use since the ascension of its namesake; it makes for a particularly obvious joke for comedy writers.
While that's certainly the common case, the heat map suggests that at least some people on reddit are using 'trumpwit' as a pejorative, which I quite like.
On an unrelated note, when I was working on the C++ compiler back then, Zortech C++ had the option of presenting error messages in Japanese. There weren't many obvious Japanese translations for technical terms. C++ "destructors" in Japanese turned into "death tractors".
Sometimes I still get caught referring to destructors as death tractors.