LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

Humankind is aggressive—physically and verbally—and both forms are dangerous. Verbal aggression in the shape of insults is widespread across languages, and I would venture to suggest that son of a bitch is one of the most widespread of them, at least in the Western world. I stand to be corrected. The expression has generated its euphemisms. In English, we find softened variants such as son of a bee , son of a biscuit , the jocular son of a gun , and the abbreviation SOB . One newspaper writes: “…but he is a damn son of a bee and yet I am very happy he was not killed” (News 24, November 24, 2017, U.S.). Y, claro, el castellano también recurre a atenuaciones del antiguo hijo de puta : hijo de pu , hijo de la Gran Bretaña , hijo de su madre … expresiones que suenan menos fuertes. The pattern itself— son of a + X , hijo de + X —is strikingly productive. Needless to say, I reject both such verbal aggression and violence in all its forms.

The N word is taboo among polite society, and that is why instead of "nigger" people use the silly euphemism "the N word ." Nigga, nigger, niggar refer to a black person. I suppose this is so because black people react violently when th ey are addressed as "niggar". If they did not react, wh ites would probably s top calling them "nigg ars" and would have to find another word. Blacks call whites "kraka", and whites feel insulted by the term . I sort of like it myself.  Most of my friends are krakas and they are all right, most of them. Words are neither good nor bad, only insofar as we are affected by them, to paraphrase Baruch de Spinoza.  Call me whatever, but treat me as a human being. There's the rub. YOLO is a new acrony m used on the internet, mainly by those who are still wet behind the ears, and it means You Only L ive Once.  It is used to justify whatever one does because, after all, we only live once, so what the he...

BASTARD ha perdido su antigua fuerza pero sigue siendo un insulto fuerte. Originalmente, claro, se refería a los hijos ilegítimos o naturales. Era un oprobio ser hijo ilegítimo, que quería decir hijo de padres no casados o, peor, de madre soltera, single mother, como se dice hoy. El Primer Ministro de Australia Gough Whitlam soltó una vez: “... I hope you will not publicly call me a bastard, as some bastards ... have.” ¿Cuál sería la equivalencia en castellano? Bastardo no. Bastardo en lengua castellana no ha tenido nunca la fuerza que bastard en la inglesa. Pero cabrón sí que nos puede ser útil como equivalencia: You are a bastard, eres un cabrón. La palabra la podemos emplear para describir al boss who’s a real bastard, o hasta a some politicians who are also bastards... Muchas posibilidades, desde luego, pero cuidado con decírselo a nadie a la cara, por si acaso. A título de curiosidad: encuentro bastard 22 millones de veces en Internet. Sólo 4 millones de resultados de la palabra...