When I travel to French- or Spanish-speaking countries, I usually can suss out a few words, a bit of the language, enough to get by. Hommes are men, si is yes.
But Danish is another kettle of fish. A difficult language to learn, heard by an English speaker, it's an incomprehensible gabble, like an audiotape being played backward. Luckily every single person we encountered in Copenhagen spoke fluent English. Considerate of them.
This sign was even more enigmatic: Ungdom giv en fuck for din kommune! Based on the photo of the three happy multi-ethnic young people, it seemed a public service poster of some kind. I wondered: could "fuck" have some separate meaning in Danish? That would be awkward.
No, fuck means in Danish exactly what it means in English, and the sentence translates out as, "Youth, give a fuck about your community!"
Well, points for reaching out to kids, and speaking their own language, as it were. But that leaving us with the enigma of why the Danes don't have their own word for "fuck" — why import it from English?
Lots of languages import English words — "hamburger" "sexy" "smartphone" and such — just as English borrows lots of words from other languages: "taco," "rendezvous," "stein."
And many languages have their own version of "fuck" — in Greek it's ya moto," which sounds very Japanese — ironic, since Japanese does not have an equivalent to "fuck" — if they're looking for an obscene expletive, they use kso, or "shit." Many languages do the same, using female body parts, for instance, to convey the sense we have with "fuck."
Others, like the Danes, just take the blunt English word. In Afrikaans, it's fok. Ditto for Norwegian, it's føkk, which is quite close.
I tried to find out why some cultures adopt it, and others don't, and pretty much came up empty, except for the general reason to snag English loanwords — because the language is seen in many quarters, still, as young, modern and cool.
As for why the Danes would display an obscenity in a context where it would never appear in the United States, that's easy. Remember, we are a nation of busybodies and prudes, the descendents of martinets, religious fanatics and busybodies. Denmark, on the other hand, is famously liberal. "The Danes are known for being cosmopolitan, well-educated, and open-minded people," the AFS website observes. Not three qualities that could ever be attached to our country, alas. A teacher was fired in Texas for reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" to her eighth grade class. It's starting to feel like, as a nation, we're føkked.
Unfortunately, the ‘Diary of Anne Frank’ is not the one that should be read by every schoolchild in America. Turns out it is a graphic novel that veers off into sexual fantasies in ‘discussions’ between Anne and a close friend. Nothing to get up in arms about, but it gives the ‘freedom’ squads that are trying to take over public education and libraries another rumor to spread. (I haven’t seen the book. I doubt if many of the people trying to ban it have, either.) It also does a great disservice to the original, since the nitwit brigade will be convinced that they are one and the same book.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, they heard about it from someone who saw it on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter. (That doesn’t sound nearly as cool as ‘§ the artist formerly known as Prince.’)
Now, a Missouri gubernatorial candidate is staging mock book burnings with a flamethrower. Unfortunately, there were no accidents. Just the one his mother had, apparently.
Trans John/Karen 3/22
I hope the teacher is suing their asses.
ReplyDeleteAre you aware that the German stamp you posted here is from the Nazi era? Complete with swastika? That's not a good look, Neil. Suggest you replace it.
ReplyDeleteYes, I picked the stamp, because it was the stamp I had in mind. I own the stamp. I'm not a believer in bowdlerizing history. There is a medal with a swastika on display at the Rijksmuseum. I didn't suggest they replace it. Turning away from ugly history is not a habit exclusive to the right, unfortunately.
DeleteThis is fair.
DeleteMy dad took a job with the OECD in Norway and I went to high school there. I did walk home from school uphill in the snow, and for part of the year, in the dark. I confess I far preferred Denmark.
ReplyDeleteLearning another language can help avoid embarrassment.
ReplyDeleteHistorical linguists would suggest that "fuck" actually goes back to "Proto-Germanic," the "parent" of all the Germanic languages, including English, Danish, Norwegian, etc.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as I reached paragraph four of today's column ("This sign was even more enigmatic: Ungdom give en fuck for dine kommune!"), I thought, "Okay, this one ain't going into print." Which is a shame, because sometimes ideas worth wider discussion get all bogged down with the wording.
ReplyDeleteEuropean media don't seem to have the same restrictions. Recently some stories on comedian Russell Brand led me to an on-line column by Marina Hyde on The Guardian's website which included "fuck" and "fucked" in two different quotes, simply straight renderings of someone else's utterances, and I read right through both of them without encountering the usual speed bumps of replacement-hyphen or "f-bomb" fussiness. I get the impression that the Guardian's print edition probably spelled them out, too.
It is, after all, just another word, and I know it's very important in the sense that it can make a big impact on the listener, but only in America is there the conviction that our heads will explode from reading it. I see occasional American newspaper tiptoeing into quoting "bullshit" in full, usually when quoting some overheated politician, so perhaps we will achieve clear communication ourselves one day.
Actually, the date — Thursday — could have been the tip-off, as the column only runs Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays.
DeleteIn today's blog you write about the Nebraska pol burning books, and someine upset about the language in Anne Frank's diary both of which I find as disturbing as you do. Then, completely missing your points someone complains about the stamp which you used as illustration of a point (a historical point in my mind.) If history is ignored, it could happen again, if it hasn't already.
ReplyDeleteI lived in the Netherlands for a couple of years. Much of their TV programming is English-language, with Dutch subtitles. It seemed like every derogatory swear (jagoff, asshole, bastard, etc.) was translated as "klootzak," a slang for scrotum.
ReplyDeleteAll that English-language TV probably contributes to the high proficiency in English there. I think it's similar in other countries whose languages don't have critical mass for professional dubbing. So Danes, Scandinavians and Flemish-speaking Belgians are pretty good in English; less so for French, Spaniards and Italians. (That doesn't explain Germany, though, where TV is dubbed but English proficiency is pretty high.)
As always enjoyed your column . But just noticed the wondering in the ad for your book does not have the cute lettering. Why is it changed?
ReplyDeleteDo you mean "wording"? Even so, not sure what you mean here. Could you be more specific?
DeleteI'm not fluent in anything but English. Yeah, I had two years of Spanish in junior high (required, because in 1960 it was thought of as "the language of tomorrow" ), and then two more years in high school, and even a year in college (which was like another year of high-school Spanish). But I've forgotten most of it. Can't speak it or write it or read it, although might be able to carry on a rudimentary conversation if I had to.
ReplyDeleteI know a handful of Norwegian words, thanks to my ex-wife and her family, and a LOT of Yiddish, because my mother only spoke that language until she started school at the age of five. She and my father used to speak it when they didn't want me and my sister to understand them, but the older I got, the more I knew.
They often used obscene words like "shtup", perhaps related to German stupsen (“nudge”), or possibly German stopfen (“stuff”). It's pretty much the standard Yiddish word for screwing, banging, or fucking.Has such a mellifluous sound to it. Used it whenever I could get it into a conversation. Hell, I was the kind of kid who laughed out loud when my cousin showed me his model biplanes...all those WWI-era Fokkers.
My wife is of German descent, and pretty good in German, having taken years of it in school. She knows more Yiddish than I do, because of its strong ties to German. Today,, in my geezerhood, when my mother is gone, I kick myself for not having taken that instead. The general consensus in the early Sixties was that German was "too hard"...and that Spanish was "easy" to learn. German is not all that hard...and a lot of English and Yiddish words come from German words. Never mind how they used all those long words like unterseeboot...under the sea boat..for submarine. That was what probably scared me off.
Nothing would have made me happier than to have been able to call up my widowed mother when she was in her 80s and to have had a conversation in what elderly Jews called "the mamaloshen"...the mother tongue. She would have been overjoyed to be able to speak Yiddish in her twilight years. I could have taken classes, but I was simply too lazy. And now, almost all of those who spoke it can no longer do so. Yiddish is not just the language of the very old...it's mostly the language of the dead.