Of Skull Fucking and Eaten Mothers: A scholarly essay by your's truly.

Having lived in two seperate societies now and having the usuall boyish penchant for naughty words, I've come to notice that different societies have quite different methods of cursing, especially when we begin to discuss fighting words.

Now in America, most of our curse words center around the sexual things you will do to your enemy, or the perverse and unusual things that your enemy is into. A quick example: "I'm going to fuck you up, you motherfucker" Ahhh the classics. Now here we have a fine example of both parts of American cursing. Still a better example would be from Full Metal Jacket, where the drill sergeant claims that he will "Rip out your eyes and skull fuck you". Now in this case, we have both violence and sexuality (although the man who is into skull fucking is a strange bird indeed... I don't know, call me provincial). In any case, you get the point... lots of sex in American curse words.

In Korean cursing, however, its all about the violence. I learned this one from a good friend of mine and it still amazes me every time I think about it. When I asked this friend what the worst thing you could say in Korean would be, he replied "I'm gonna grind your eyes to powder and drink them" Well friends, what can I say? THAT'S some violent shit. So naturally I thought I had heard the granddaddy of all insults at that point.

Then, last week, I was reading a book by Jared Diamond called Collapse (good book by the way). In any case one of the chapters of this book deals with Easter Island society and why it collapsed. Towards the end of society, when agriculture went to pot and there was no food left, the islanders turned to cannablism.... You know, based on my ability to weave skull fucking and cannabalism into the same scholarly essay, I got to say I'm pretty damn talented.
So in any case, the most cutting insult in the Easter Island language at this time (I swear I'm not making this up) was "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth". I'll just let you marinate on that for a second.

Now, if we examine this, we see that not only is it incredibly violent, and not only does it bring someone's mother into the insult (basically an effective strategy in any language), it also implies that the person' s mother was mostly gristle! Now that is an insult! I mean really, Dr. Lecter's fava beans and chianti really don't amount to shit compared to that.

I'm not suggesting that we should abandon our time honored skull fucking tradition, but maybe we should consider adding to it.