I wrote an essay in reaction to a conversation about offensiveness and vulgarity that I had with a dear friend earlier today. I spent a little too long thinking about this for it to only have a readership of three or four, so I thought I’d share it here.
This blog is officially back online, by the way. If any of you out there in the matrix still care, I’ll be posting more, and with frequency. Blogging is so aughtish, but I’m in an increasingly reactionary mood these days.. Let’s celebrate and meditate upon the past in all its scandal and glory. Let’s frustrate the still nihilistic point of Nirvana looming within us, with all the the contempt and carnal vigor we can.
Christus Victor. Ave Crux Spes Unica.
Profound blessing upon you all, if you are still here, out there.
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French is more elegant, and perhaps in some ways more precise than English, but that formality and precision are exactly what I dislike about it. It feels like a cage, where English is much more open, freer. French constrains your thoughts, your soul. It’s also less musical somehow than English, in that its rhythm is too regular, whereas English has an irregular syncopation that frees you to do interesting things poetically. This is why English pop music rules the world - the stress, the beat, can fall anywhere, where in French the stress is always in the same place, at the end.
One of the ways that French is more formal is in the use of vulgarity. English is an inherently vulgar tongue. She’s a whore that takes all comers, takes the essence (so to speak) of many strange and alien things into herself, she adapts freely to foreign influences, receives novelties without complaint. She’s a creole, a mutt, a hybrid, a mongrel, an amalgamation; whereas French aspires to Latinate purity that apes Cicero. French is straight out of the Bourbon Court, English is off the London Wharves. It’s ballroom dance versus the mosh pit. English’s core (coeur), its heart, is German, and that is nowhere clearer than in its vulgarity: compare merde to shit.
Shit is a much better word, it feels good to say. Merde makes the mouth pucker, shit makes it explode. Same with fuck, dick, crap or cunt. All are frictive, plosive, they’re Teutonic knives that stab. French has no equivalents - that I know of - to these words. You can’t say fuck in French, it doesn’t exist. The Quebecois tabarnac is the closest thing, but that’s blasphemous, and takes three syllables to say, which to me is true obscenity.
Italian is a much better language than French. It is more beautiful to listen to, far funnier, and far more vulgar. It’s both higher and lower than French. It has most of French’s strengths, and many of English’s. Think of catzo - that’s a funny word, also a sharp one. It cuts, and it sings. Kay Bellah Feegah. That’s some beautiful music, there. It’s also an elegant obscenity, because it describes something beautiful and holy in the most poetic and sonorous way possible.
The fact that the dialects have not been as radically suppressed in Italy as they have been in France is one of the things that gives Italian interest, and power. It’s nowhere as controlled, as constrained as French. It’s a more open, more powerful language.
That song I sent you - Pallets Full Of Ballots 🇺🇸 - illustrates what I’m saying. “I tell y’all I ‘bout shit myself when I turned on the morning news..” “They took their caps off of their sharpies and they filled them fuckers in.” “Sleepy Joe said ‘Come on man, I’ll hope you’ll be a good sport,' Donald Trump said ‘Fuck that shit, I’ll see your ass in court.'” “They want us to bend over so they can butt fuck us again..” That’s all high vulgar poetry. It’s very funny, and very fun to say. Butt fuck. Great words: You can’t say butt fuck in French. It’s just impossible. French is in this sense impoverished compared to English.
One of the weaknesses of both French and Italian is how their complicated and abstruse gender and verb systems make it much more difficult to write well. English is much simpler. Not as subtle, maybe, but that lack of subtlety makes it easier to express your thoughts. French falls into a trap of pure logic and pensées raffinées, where they blather on and on and on without really saying anything meaningful. French falls too easily into verbal masturbation. English is all about force and directness. It’s a punch in the gut, not a rapier touch. Speaking English is fucking, not jerking off.
Anyway, when I wrote "ça c'est de la merde” in that comment the other day, what I was thinking was “that’s bullshit.” Or, “that’s horseshit.” Or, "that’s a load of steaming crap.” All of these are admittedly quite vulgar. They’re also not really that offensive to say in English. You can - and people often do - say these sorts of things in front of their grandmothers. You could knock the vulgarity up a notch, and say “that’s a crock of shit.” Then your grandmother might frown, and tell you to watch your language.
Donna, for example, complains whenever Dick says fuck. She won’t abide the word cunt. Cunt is probably the most transgressive word in English. It has none of the elegance and refinement of figa. But it is also quite a wonderful word. It’s violent, contemptuous, full of anger, disdain and hate. It snaps and wounds like a predator. It's utterly, inexpressibly vulgar. I love it.
Vulgar, after all, denotes the people: vulgar, late Middle English: from Latin vulgaris, from vulgus ‘common people.’
It’s like how a man like Donald Trump would never rise to the top of European politics, certainly not French politics.
One of the main reasons Americans love the man is his sheer vulgarity. Vulgarity that crudely transgresses the bounds of French, Swiss, German, International bourgeois normality and respectability. He makes the pious hypocrites clutch their pearls, and virtue signal their supposed inherent superiority, when in fact they are at least as corrupt, violent, venal, dishonorable and dishonest as he is.
He is offensive. Deal with it. He is an asshole, but he is our asshole. He says "things you aren’t supposed to say” but this is far better than a simulacrum of a man like Joe Biden, who is so full of shit and corruption that he is almost the exact opposite of what he professes to be. “One has all the goodness, the other all the appearance of it.”
It’s the tax collectors and prostitutes versus the pharisees. Whited sepulchers versus the open sinner. I’ll take the open sinner any day over the covert treasonous liar. The obvious fraud is far preferable to the occulted one.
It’s like how they blaspheme freely, taking the name of God in vain. That’s what offends me, but they do not care. They tell us not to say cunt (“that’s sexist”) while they butcher babies in the womb, and incinerate children in Yemen.
I know what is truly obscene, and it isn't vulgar words denoting sex and excrement.
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