Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

ESFL

I can see how it must be a problem if you’re learning English. It’s a major part of the language, but it’s not something they teach you in school. How to swear, that is. Where to put the fucking swear words, to add that extra oomph. You don’t want to come across as a wuss and insert the f… word in the fucking wrong place. Like that. It needs to be in the right fucking place.

Anyway, help is at hand, with “English as a Second F*cking Language : How to Swear Effectively” (via).

Let’s hope this book can help avoid embarrassing faux pas, such as in this e-mail received by Paul Belien at Brussels Journal, on the subject of the Danish cartoons:

Dear Sir, Ms
please stop to show mohammad cartoon.
if it’s fredom,so we could attack to your embassy and kill you, then say :it’s freedom!!
you don’t know mohammad,if you knew, you never ever do that.
fuck up mother fucker

Fuck up?? The man (and I think we can assume it’s a man) betrays his lack of class straight away.

[Update: Paul Belien has now removed his post containing the e-mail]

Posted in

6 responses to “ESFL”

  1. P. Froward Avatar
    P. Froward

    A bit off-topic, but in blog comments about the Mickey Mouse Jihad, comments by actual (apparent) Muslims, I’ve been noticing a common thread: There’s no distinction recognized between speech and actions. That’s a bit of a cultural gulf, if I’m understanding them correctly. I recall a Hizbullah knucklehead years ago saying that killing Jews was a form of political speech protected by the First Amendment. I figured at the time he was having a laugh, but maybe not. I mean, entirely aside from Lebanon not having ratified the US Bill of Rights.

    Like

    Reply
  2. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    Well yes, you may be on to something there. From the e-mail it seems like the guy makes no distinction between a prohibition on words and a prohibition on deeds, so freedom just means a total lack of all restraint, where you can do or say anything. With that kind of mentality, “freedom of expression” is a more or less meaningless phrase, like a total lack of morality. Which is how they (the Islamists) view the West anyway, as having no morality. The idea of a morality where actions (violence) can be proscribed but expression is (more or less) free seems totally alien.

    Like

    Reply
  3. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    ESFL includes “fuck up” as a proper curse. From page 11:
    “As a noun, FUCK UP refers to a botched situation or an incompetent person. As a verb, FUCK UP refers to the action that caused it.”
    I don’t know if he meant this as a noun or a verb, though. Isn’t Noam Chomsky a linguist? Maybe he could explain the finer points.

    Like

    Reply
  4. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    I’d assumed it was meant as a verb, “fuck up mother fucker”. If it was meant as a noun, he’d have written, “fuck up. mother fucker”, ie a double insult. But then it’s probably not wise to rely on the punctuation here.

    Like

    Reply
  5. P. Froward Avatar
    P. Froward

    I thought he meant to call the guy a “fucked up motherfucker”.
    The “you don’t know mohammad” bit sounds like Tom Cruise, doesn’t it?
    Anyhow, this just occurs to me: If we are to avoid offending people, each of us has to learn about every religion he may run into. For a population P, with a number of religions R, the effort involved is proportional to P * R. But if each of us learns to, as they say, “chill the fuck out”, the effort is proportional to P. For realistic values of R, the latter approach is obviously more efficient.
    Of course, there’s a hidden assumption here that people have something better to do with their lives than divide their time between studying up on everybody else’s religion, and policing everybody else’s interactions with their own. Lots of people find that assumption incompehensible.

    Like

    Reply
  6. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    I must say that I don’t much care for your use of “wuss”. Sounds American to me.

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to dearieme Cancel reply