Chapter 74

Expletives:

An old friend of mine visited me here in Bangtao last week and he reminded me of an incident which occurred in his early days as a geophysicist.
He was supervising a team of labourers on a shallow seismic refraction survey.
One of the labourers broke his shovel. He approached my friend waving the broken shovel in front of him.

"Fuck! the fucking fucker's fucked" he exclaimed.

Wonderful! such economy of language. A perfect description of the facts combined with the appropriate emotions. I, certainly, could not have put it better myself.

However the lack of variety in the expletives used would I fear soon become tiresome and indicate, perhaps, a paucity of mental capacity.

I have recently observed such a phenomenon in this delightfully varied ex-pat. society here in Phuket.
As I have mentioned in previous stories, the typical ex-pat. community contains a huge diversity of talents, from highly intelligent go-getters who would succeed wherever they were transplanted to alcoholic no-hopers who would fail wherever they were. (In fairness I should point out that alcoholic over-indulgence is common throughout the spectrum).
I guess most of us fit somewhere in the middle.

But back to expletives.

There is amongst our company a gentleman who often achieves the task of using the word "fuck" or some derivative of it, on average, about every third word.
He also manages to include the word "cunt" at the end of just about every third sentence.
I suppose an example would be in order here though I am far from comfortable with the use of the latter Anglo-Saxon expletive, particularly in mixed company.
But here goes anyway. (Sensitive readers look away!).

"What the fuck was that fucking driver up the fucking road fucking about at?
I told him to fuck off - the stupid cunt."

Now I find this all a little distasteful but when it is carried on continually for an hour or so my distaste is overwhelmed, numbed by the tedium of the drab lack of imagination of the language.
I believe that expletives have their part to play in language and can add meaning, texture, colour and, (as in the case of the labourer's shovel), humour to one's appreciation of life.
But please can we try to be a little more imaginative, adventurous, daring, innovative and perhaps amusing?

Because, frankly, otherwise it all gets a bit fucking boring.

As an aside I have noticed that swearing in a foreign language is pointless since it loses all of its emotional impact. One can repeat the word "fuck" in front of a Thai lady as often as you like and it will have no resonance.
I have, for example, noticed the gentleman referred to earlier "f"ing and "c"ing ad nausiam in front of perfectly respectable Thai ladies without them looking in the slightest discomfited.

So I am in the process of conducting an experiment.

The first stage is complete. My grasp of Thai bad language is not good but I do know that "yet pet" means fairly harmlessly "fuck a duck".
I have tried using it in front of these same Thai ladies. They winced, looked shocked and two of them told me that I should not use such language - as they returned to listening to our friend "f"ing and "c"ing to his heart's content.

So phase two will be as follows:

With the help of my Thai teacher, a literate lady who believes in teaching me all such Thai colloquialisms as well as imparting the wisdom on when and when not to use them, I am concocting a few sentences in Thai at the same linguistic level as the "f"ing and "c"ing language used above.
I look forward to trying these out on my local Thai friends merely to point out that such language, whatever native tongue it is spoken in is obscene, offensive and worst of all tediously boring.

Now it occurs to me that some people reading this just might think that I have an axe to grind.

To them I can only say - "Too fucking right!"