Cussed in Translation

It’s been said that where everybody smells, nobody smells. Here in Spain, a corollary occurs to me: Where everybody cusses, nobody cusses. In a land where people will “sh*t in the milk” to express mild frustration and invoke testicles to sweeten a compliment, it can be difficult to raise eyebrows with language.¹ If that’s kind of fascinating—at what point does profanity cease to profane? whence the elevation of ungainly reproductive organ to everyday interjection?—it can be frustrating, too. There are, after all, occasions in life when a person might want to raise eyebrows with language. When a person is teaching a middle-school EFL class with a 9:1 boy-to-girl ratio, for example.   

If you are not yet convinced that human beings are related to chimpanzees, I would encourage you to drop in on a middle-school class with a 9:1 boy-to-girl ratio. Middle-school boys are not, as a rule, well versed in the nuances of courtship. They simply sense, somewhere deep in the most primal folds of their brains, that the time has come to quit teasing the girls and start jockeying amongst themselves for the girls’ attention. And jockey they do. If there are plenty of girls about, the competitive buffoonery is relatively scattered, which is to say manageable. But when nine chicos are competing for the attention of a single chica, it doesn’t take much at all—the teacher drops a pen, a classmate sneezes—to stir the entire lot into a frenzy of general jackassery, each boy screeching and howling and bouncing around in a chimply fashion, one eye fixed on the girl this behavior is meant, somehow, to impress. 

Poor Noelia. She was a good student, the best in the class by a long shot. Quiet and attentive, she consistently ignored the simian antics of her suitors, concentrating instead on her prepositions and participles. Naturally this only made things worse. Maybe she just didn’t hear us, the boys thought; maybe we weren’t inane enough, they speculated—then ramped up the volume and the inanity accordingly. The only vaguely productive week for them was the week Noelia, the star student, was out sick with a stomach virus. Sans chica, the chicos had no idea what to do, no clue as to why they were alive on earth at all. They sat there, dazed and mouth-breathing, kind of stunned, looking like they’d each been clubbed in the head with a stout leg of jamón. It was wonderful. I couldn’t help hoping Noelia’s bug would hang on for a while. 

It didn’t. When she returned the next Monday, the boys required less than ever—a student hiccuped, I think—to spring into full-bore chimpandemonium. After a week of relative calm, I was in no mood, and before I knew it I was crossing a line teachers are not ever supposed to cross: I was cussing at them, firing off every Spanish obscenity I could think of. Not with any skill, mind you—¡Cago cojones! ¡Hijos de joder! ¡Puta mierda!—but with conviction.² If I got fired for this, so be it. I wanted drop-jawed silence and wide-eyed stupor, and I wanted it now. 

But…there was no drop-jawed silence. There was no wide-eyed stupor. We were in Andalucía, a part of the world where the c-word, coño, is used far and wide and often, to mean something like I’ll be darned! I hadn’t crossed a line at all. If anything, tossing a few cojones and putas into the mix had only stirred up the hormonal havoc. Worse still, because Spanish was my second language, the raunchy rant hadn’t much affected me, either. Where was the scandalous thrill, the wicked delight? Where was the liberation? If I wanted this gambit to work, I would have to really feel what I was saying. I would have to say it in English. 

No problem. Con placer. Tapping reserves I hadn’t used since my commercial-fishing days, I blasted the class with a firestorm of profanity that would have made my dear mother weep. Once I got going, it was hard to stop, the wave of sweet horrible filth carrying me into a kind of ecstatic, speaking-in-tongues state, my eyes closed in rapture. When at last I opened them again, pausing for a breath, I discovered a radically different ecosystem. There was no howling. No screeching. No bouncing around chimp-wise. There was only this: one middle-school girl resuming her phrasal-verb assignment (Noelia gathered this wasn’t about her) while nine middle-school boys sat gazing at their teacher in drop-jawed silence, with wide-eyed stupor. 

It’s not what I’d said, of course—few of these kids had ever heard any of those words before—but how I’d said it. They didn’t have to know what an f-bomb was to feel the concussive blast. They didn’t have to know what motherf*cker meant (who does?) to understand, quite clearly, that you do not want to be called one. They did not have to have the slightest clue what I was saying, to get what I was laying down. 

I never had to lay it down again. Not like that. From then on, a strategically placed, properly enunciated burst of back-deck invective served to swiftly rein in any monkey business, and turn our attention to more civilized pursuits. 

1. ¿No hay jamón? ¡Me cago en la leche! — “There’s no ham? I sh*t in the milk!”

¡Qué rico el jamón, cojones! — “This is great ham, balls!”

2. Roughly: “I poop balls! Sons of f*ck! Whore sh*t!”