Effing and blinding

I was wondering about swearing this morning. I mean, in the abstract; not that I was jumping up and down having just driven an errant nail through my little toe and thinking that there used to be a good word in my vocabulary for just this occasion that had been eroded by all these years of sanitizing my language for use around children. Swearing. The Irish are known for their love of bad language, and I don't think it's all down to that one time Bono said that thing on American national TV. If you've seen In Bruges, you'll know what I'm talking about.


But it's not fair. Other nations swear a lot too, they just do it in their own languages. I'm not saying that all Americans and every Englishman - not to mention the wily Welsh and surly Scots - have speech that's unmitigatedly fair and delightful, but on the whole we Irish are the ones tarnished by the effing brush when it comes to English-speaking countries. (Oh, and the Aussies. They're pretty bad.)

But have you ever heard a Spaniard swear? They've turned it into an art form. It's a point of personal pride to come up with the most elaborate and creative profanities imaginable. (Which made me wonder if it's something common to Catholic countries...) I'm sure other nations in other languages are also quick to blaspheme and find release in using rude words, we just don't hear about them. Do the Irish legitimately have a bad rep?


(You know the way every generation thinks it invented sex? Or at least the orgasm? I was pretty certain as a teenager that swearing was a modern innovation and that my parents had probably never heard any of the words my schoolmates bandied about with such vigour. Convent girls, you know, are the worst. This was not helped by the fact that our Shakespeare was sanitized and somehow they managed to choose only those very few poems in the world that are not literally or metaphorically - at least on the first, second or third readings - directly about sex for our exam texts. I was very surprised when I went to University and discovered that everything anyone has ever written that qualifies as English literature is actually about sex. But I digress.)

So what do you think? Does every language have its potty-mouths? Are Latvians the Bonos of the Baltics, perhaps? Do the Flemish put the phlegm in vitriol? Are the Japanese really calling each other by arcane words for genitalia when they do all that saving face and refusing to say no? Or does every nation think really they could do with cleaning up their vocabulary, at least in front of the children?