Sacré bleu!
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I could write an entire post about this euphemistic French oath (lit., "sacred blue"), but I leave it to LL readers to figure out how it fits in to what follows. Nowadays it is used more in English than in French. (Wiktionary; Wikipedia)
Italian blasphemy and German ingenuity: how swear words differ around the world
Once dismissed as a sign of low intelligence, researchers now argue the ‘power’ of taboo words has been overlooked
Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian (10/19/25)
The number and nature of swear words in different cultures reveals a lot about the predispositions of the people who speak the languages of those societies.
When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely.
While native English speakers in the UK and Spanish speakers in Spain rattled off an average of 16 words, Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence, to hodenkobold, or “testicle goblin”, someone who is being annoying.
The results, researchers say, hint at how the overlooked field of social faux pas – whether it be swearing, insults or other off-limit language – can help us better understand the values, boundaries and shifting norms that shape different cultures.
“These words can be more offensive, or less, they can be loaded with negativity or with irony,” said Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive scientist and professor at Madrid’s Nebrija University. “But taken together, they offer small snapshots of the realities of each culture.”
One thing that needs to be considered in a study of slang in various cultures is that individual members of these cultures may have widely varying standards of what is beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior for his/her society. For example, I have a colleague who is fond of hurling the f-bomb, even in faculty meetings, though no one else would dream of doing so.
When it came to the differences between Spanish and German speakers, Andoni Duñabeitia had two theories. German, with its seemingly endless capacity to build new compound words, could simply offer more options, he said. “But it could also be that some people [speaking other languages] just don’t have these words readily available, or it’s harder for them when asked to produce them in a very neutral environment,” he said.
The striking disparity of scatalogical vocabulary usage in various languages contrasts with words that seek to disparage women. For instance, "bitch", turned up across cultures.
“I think it comes down to the terribly sexist traditions of many countries,” said Andoni Duñabeitia, who was among the four dozen researchers involved with the 2024 study. “The vocabulary reflects the reality of societies where women have been mistreated, removed from everyday tasks and relegated to the background.”
- "No way to curse in Japanese?" (1/24/17)
- "The paucity of curse words in Japanese" (9/4/14)
- "Sacré bleu! — the synesthesia of Walmart cyan" (10/8/22)
[h.t. François Lang]
Maurice said,
October 21, 2025 @ 9:59 pm
so interesting to think the German language seems to encourage more use (or at least more recollection) of swear words … the concept of being allergic to intelligence is a great descriptor.
Martin Schwartz said,
October 21, 2025 @ 10:22 pm
While the "bleu", with its heavenly connotations, is apparently
a substitution for "Dieu", I wonder if the phrase was picked up
from French in England becauae of a similarity to "blood"
(viz. of Jesus), cf. Wiki. "bloody". Note also the archaic
oddsblood and zounds. Québec French notoriously has
tanernak and câlisse among the swearwords called "Les Sacres".
Martin Schwartz
Laura Morland said,
October 21, 2025 @ 11:06 pm
Martin, you beat me to the punch!
I immediately thought of blood:
~ A black eye — formed, of course, from broken blood vessels — is called "un bleu" in French.
~ And of course the blood in our veins looks blue through our skin.
I was naturally also going to mention the québecois "tabernak" and "câlisse," terms I never heard used as "mots jurés" during my 25+ years in France. A Parisian Jewish atheist mathematician once proudly informed me that the French no longer swear with words to do with God or the Church, "because we don't believe in those fairy tales any longer."
Lucas Christopoulos said,
October 22, 2025 @ 12:11 am
Martin is correct. In the French part of Switzerland, my grandfather used to say "nom de bleu!" instead of " …Dieu"
JPL said,
October 22, 2025 @ 1:04 am
The expression "son of a bitch" is a mama curse, where a man insults another man by disparaging his mother, considered, in cultures that engage in it, to be the most abominable kind of curse. No woman need be around when this is done, and it's meant to injure the man's feelings because every man reveres his mother. The equivalent for a female interlocutor would be "You daughter of a bitch!", but it doesn't really work, because women don't really tend to engage in this practice, in that way. That's the way I look at it, at least, and I would bet, although I've done no research on the question, that historically, in millennia past, before people moved into what is now called "Europe", that's what it was; I admit that people today probably don't think of the expression that way. The derived metaphorical epithet 'bitch', said by itself, has come to be the feminine gendered term of abuse corresponding to 'asshole', which is mainly for males. The type of distasteful or insensitive behaviour supposedly performed by the accused targets of these respective insults, differs according to the what is considered, in conventional thinking, to be gender-specific typical bad behaviour. "Bitch' has gone on to be a general expression of misogyny used by backward resentful males, an indication of cultural decadence, at least as compared to the days of chivalry, when people at least paid lip service.
ajay said,
October 22, 2025 @ 4:47 am
The striking disparity of scatalogical vocabulary usage in various languages contrasts with words that seek to disparage women. For instance, "bitch", turned up across cultures.
It is striking that this has become much more taboo than it was. I was brought up short by its use in a PG Wodehouse novel (where language is normally no stronger than "dash it all").
Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence
This doesn't seem like it should be a taboo word rather than just an insult – can German speakers comment? Did the Germans misunderstand the question?
Chris Button said,
October 22, 2025 @ 5:56 am
I don't think it's easily comparable. Take "kisama" for example. It literally means "you". But it's meaning is more like "you S.O.B".
Anubis Bard said,
October 22, 2025 @ 7:34 am
I find it interesting to think about how taboo words get loaded into a person's repertoire and how this is a process through a persons life. The earliest taboo-insult that I can recall was the elementary school epithet "sped" – which was short for "special education" and had a great deal of taboo power in the part of 1970s PA I was growing up in. From there things progressed more or less into gender-based stuff – mostly boys accusing other boys of being girlish in one way or another. (Not sure what the girls were up to.) Then toward middle school there was pushing the boundaries on sexualized language that most of us probably didn't much understand, until finally we had the whole repertoire of taboo words to shock each other and our elders with our assertiveness. But also, growing up in a pretty homogenous place, racial and ethnic slurs – which can be another basket of taboo words – didn't pack much if any power. And interestingly, still don't for me. It kind of makes me wonder how and when taboo-power gets wired into our brains. (Eons ago I remember reading in an abnormal psych book that brain-damage studies showed that taboo words were housed separately from other words, but I don't know whether that factoid has held up.)
David Marjanović said,
October 22, 2025 @ 7:40 am
It seems like no attempt was made to define "taboo". Many of the participants seem to have just gone for "insult". If "taboo" means "people would be genuinely shocked to hear it", like for example the American N-Word, very little other than Nazi stuff is taboo in German…
…and the two German examples are not something I've ever come across as a native speaker, and neither have the two others over on Language Hat. "Someone who's allergic to intelligence" is a transparent nonce coinage that evidently hasn't spread. And the other one… in the linked LHat discussion I was told it's a meme in the language-teaching community. Somebody must have had fun with the letter O; Hoden, you see, is the medical term for testicles, it's not used in any insults and not any more taboo than the subject itself is. There's no transparent reason why combining it with "goblin", itself far from a subject of daily conversation, should have a meaning anything like… wait while I scroll up… "someone who is being annoying".
No, it's because the church hasn't had political power in France in a long time. That's also why nobody has said sacré bleu in a long time.
Not at all. In fact, if you revere your mother too much, you're mocked as a mama's boy in that kind of culture.
Instead, it's meant to deny the man's honor by denying his father's honor (which… makes sense in that kind of culture, where honor is heritable): it says his father cheated on his mother – with a dog.
(…though… that particular insult seems to be limited to English and allegedly Arabic.)
No, women are just called bitches directly.
(…again, in English.)
The opposite, if anything – chivalry is institutionalized, regulated, official misogyny. It puts women on a pedestal and makes damn sure they stay there.
An honorific down the euphemism treadmill.
Victor Mair said,
October 22, 2025 @ 7:51 am
"The Japanese word kisama 貴様 originally denoted respect among samurai, but is now used almost exclusively in a rude and insulting way, although it can be used playfully between close male friends." (AIO, with slight modifications)
Compound of 貴 (ki-, honorific prefix) + 様 (sama, honorific suffix).
Chris Button said,
October 22, 2025 @ 8:17 am
What's interesting about kisama is that even if you don't know the 貴 kanji, the -sama is still very obviously the same polite suffix used today when addressing people. Presumably it originated sarcastically.
Chris Button said,
October 22, 2025 @ 8:58 am
More generally though, what about Japanese insults like "kusoyarō"?
Victor Mair said,
October 22, 2025 @ 9:21 am
Yes, that's bad. It's formed from "kuso" (くそ), meaning "sht," and "yaro" (野郎).
野
plains, field, rustic, civilian life
+
郎
son, counter for sons; young person; man of a particular occupation
野郎
1. guy; fellow; chap; buddy
2. bastard; asshole; arsehole; son of a bitch
Is it much used?
Is it often not used jocularly / joshingly among friends / buddies?
JJM said,
October 22, 2025 @ 10:03 am
"Québec French notoriously has tanernak and câlisse among the swearwords called 'Les Sacres.'"
Martin Schwartz makes a good point: if The Grauniad had looked at Canadian French rather than French French, they'd have seen that we easily rival Italian over here when it comes to blasphemous swear words!
(It's historical of course. As David Marjanović notes, "the church hasn't had political power in France in a long time"; here, the capture of Nouvelle France and the subsequent political accommodation of Catholicism by the British Crown meant that the Church remained a central and politically powerful institution in French Canada right up to the 20th century, unlike France.)