When so-called expletives mean something so different!

Oof… I am having a serious crisis. A crisis of words. Of metaphors. Of actual truth rather than of political correctness.

What on earth am I talking about, you must be wondering. Let me tell you. I am basically not a person who gets angry enough to swear, or yell at people or mouth obscenities or shake a fist. But sometimes, just sometimes, I need to let out an expletive in order to avoid just such a gesture or slap or…..And that is where lies the root of the problem I face.

The most common abuses, both in Indian languages as well as in English are totally out for me. Mother Fxxxx or Sister Fxxxx. As usual the woman gets the raw deal, not the bastard – ooops! Woman being blamed again, and being questioned on whom she slept with, if not the guy she is married to. Son of a bitch is the same. You never blame a son. How could you? He didn’t choose whose womb he landed in. So of course the fact that he is a worthless wastrel gets blamed on the behaviour or lasciviousness of his mother.

As a feminist and humanist, all the above are a total no no.

So what do I call the so and so? With our knowledge of animal behaviour, and my personal love and devotion to many of the wild and domesticated varieties of animals, a whole other range of expletives becomes unusable. How can I call a dirty man a dirty pig, when I know that pigs are among the cleanest animals around, cleaning up and eating up the mess that we make and leave around, including, as in many traditional Goa houses, being the disposers of human excreta (in case some of you are unaware, many old Goa houses had latrines that dropped human excreta straight into the pigs pen, and the cleaning creature would dispose of it in a trice. The fact that they then got slaughtered to feed the very people they….. Oh. Never mind.)

Or how do I call someone a swine or suvar? Same logic! They, unlike our species, are harmless creatures, who seem to like to be and let be.

To call a swindler a foxy creature is once again inapt. I am not aware of foxes who swindle thousands of crores of rupees, who adulterate food leading to the death of innocents and who subvert societal systems for personal greed. A fox uses its intelligence and wiliness to get food till it is full, never to store it for its next 65 generations with a trillion to spare.

What do we have left? Oh yes, of course the Indian rudeness relating to the bovines – in Gujarati, dobu and padino. One refers to the calf and equates it with dumbness (all the buffalo calves I know are frisky and bright, so I am confused about the origin of that one) and the latter once again resorts to insulting the mother, in this case a female water buffalo. And to call a rude so and so who pushes past you at a queue or manhandles you a beast is equally inaccurate.

And I mustn’t forget the most common insult – “You ass” – to denote stupidity. Now I have a problem with equating good nature and a gentle pace with stupidity however fast the world may turn. A nicer, more calm and tender beast than the donkey is hard to find. And the look in the baby’s eyes is to die for. SO why is the beast equated to stupidity? Just because it doesn’t jump the traffic light to prove it is in a hurry and very important? No, that won’t do.

I’ve run out of expletives. (The Gujarati ‘sala’ also denigrates the wife’s sister so that is also unacceptable). I have scratched my brain and looked up dictionaries and have decided to face the truth. The worst abuse we can give our race is to call them human beings. With our track record of terror, hatred, violence, greed and more, there is no race to compare. In fact, to be called a swine, or a pig, a bitch or a ‘pada’ should make the creatures cringe and us walk taller for being compared to noble animals. We have not done much recently to deserve the compliment.