Funnily written and funnily organized, this little booklet is an amusing (and informative) read for the language enthusiasts out there. This essential phrasebook collects the most colourful, explicit, and outrageous ways to tell people off in every part of the world. Thus the most transgressive language in many cultures involves sexual acts on a person’s mother (sometimes specifying her genitalia). A loosely curated collection of swear words around the world, with little to no cultural context to make it interesting, and no indication of pronunciation guide. The reason I can say this is because I am writing in English, not Finnish, Dutch, or Québécois French.

Among Christian cultures, the line between those that swear a lot about mothers and whores and those that don’t looks quite like the line between those where Mary is a co-star with Jesus and those where she’s part of the supporting cast. pages packed with curses, phrases and elaborate insults, in dozens of languages; it even includes phonetic pronunciation and pictures. Our word ‘bear’ comes from a word for ‘brown’ that was used in place of the ‘true’ name of the animal; nobody wanted to say its name lest it appear. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.Each rude entry contains a rating indicating the degree of offensiveness of the word, along with its country of origin, translation, and language information. Some of the most useful expressions include wishing an enemy a painful death, insulting a person’s grandmother and accusing someone’s mother of having intimate relations with bears in the forest. If everyday language is like the earth’s crust and the soil we garden our lives in, strong language is like volcanoes and geysers erupting through it from the mantle below. Featuring dozens of different languages, the sayings range from everyday swears to family curses to x-rated encounters with animals.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter . This might be okay if it were a bunch of friends sitting around comparing expressions and swear words in languages they might have learned while traveling, but zero support on pronunciation of terms and no consistency with each language offering their version of the swear word. This collection of funny visual puzzles has your keys hidden in a range of everyday and not-so-everyday environments. Each card displays a swearword in a specific language along with a translation in English so you know what swearword you’re saying, along with a rating on how offensive each word is from 1 star to 5 stars.Thankfully, here’s the only piece of kit you’ll need to really develop your arsenal of fruity phrases, the guide on How To Swear Around The World. Perfect for the international traveler who may need to wish an enemy a painful death, insult a person's grandmother, or accuse someone's mother of having intimate relations with bears in the forest. I was hoping for more creative phrases, and there are a few corkers in there, but it could have gone further. Some of the F-word swears spread more broadly, onto father (Bosnian ), grandfather, even the whole set of relatives: Albanian ( qifsha robt “your family”), Turkish ( sülaleni sikeyim "your extended family"), Mandarin ( cào nǐ zǔzōng shíbā dài "your ancestors to the 18th generation"). In Luganda (an African language), you can make a word insulting just by changing its noun class prefix – from a class for persons to a class for certain kinds of objects, for instance.

Featuring dozens of different languages, the sayings range from everyday swears to family curses to expressions for . Spanish has puta and hijo de puta, Italian has puttana, and French loads up on prostitutes and brothels – and faeces. The mistakes in my native language made me doubt of the other translations of languages I'm not familiar with.Sex, though desired, is – in the angry, aggressive part of the mind – a dominating act, something performed upon a weaker recipient. Some of the most useful expressions include wishing an enemy a painful death, insulting a person's grandmother and accusing someone's mother of having intimate relations with bears in the forest.

This essential phrasebook collects the most colourful, explicit and outrageous ways to tell people off in different languages from all around the world. Covering all topics from the science behind the munchies (it's very real), the botanical link between beer and weed, and why smoking cannabis makes Pink Floyd sound so damned good. Prostitutes defy a wife’s exclusivity and a man’s ownership, which is likely why words for ‘whore’ are also very common strong language in many parts of the world – and in some languages (such as Luganda) why words for genitalia are avoided: prostitutes use them.Oh well, it's not even correct to begin with and this phrase doesn't exist (not even in its correct shape). Animals can be dirty too, and are used in many insults, but animals are not normally near the morality-based social control structures, so they’re not usually what we think of as swear words – except when they come from veiled references, as with Mandarin guītóu (turtle’s head, standing in for penis). As useful as it is hilarious, Sacher's How to Swear Around the World teaches readers all kinds of vulgar phrases in dozens of different languages. D Ne znam kako funkcionišu psovke po svetu, niti me to specijalno zanima, uzela sam ovo čisto da vidim kako je predstavljen region. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).