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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zerocrates|3 years ago|reply
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?
[1] https://forum.dlang.org/thread/[email protected]... [2] https://gihyo-jp.translate.goog/book/2005/4-7741-2208-4/?_x_...
[+] [-] thematrixturtle|3 years ago|reply
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.
More on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_profanity
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger%27s_Profanisaurus
[+] [-] schindlabua|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selectodude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotherevan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fifticon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jefurii|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcameron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsimpson|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shitgibbon
[+] [-] ineedasername|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bluedino|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] replygirl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] walrus01|3 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] cs137|3 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] bergenty|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmje|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=F...
[+] [-] colordrops|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Der_Einzige|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempestn|3 years ago|reply
Also, the compound assclown was coined by Office Space: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2467219/how-office-space-co...
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.
[+] [-] felixfurtak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullc|3 years ago|reply
(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")
[+] [-] justsomehnguy|3 years ago|reply
It even doesn't need to be an obscure one, it just can be "not PC enough".
Can you guess what word got my post shadowbanned from r/powershell?
[+] [-] ohCh6zos|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] webkike|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway821909|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] googlryas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pad_thai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MonkeyMalarky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohCh6zos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jim-jim-jim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smolder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c23gooey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jedd|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pilaf|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shitrag
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/assbag
[+] [-] alex_young|3 years ago|reply
It’s even Shakespearean: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...
Relation to the more modern asshat: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/some-notes-on-...
[+] [-] jefc1111|3 years ago|reply
Also 'dipboy' is a weird.one. maybe a crypto thing..?
[+] [-] chaosfox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sedatk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panopticon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs137|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _jal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cs137|3 years ago|reply
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.