Friday, March 11, 2011

Very Naughty Language herein

I believe I've solved profanity.

At least, I've discovered a formula for inventing nonce-fuckyous that keeps me entertained while yelling at New jersey drivers, and prevents my repertoire from getting stale.

First, choose any one-syllable profanity. The short ones tend to be punchiest and most visceral anyway.

Then take any mundane single-word trochee--a two-syllable word with a stressed first syllable and unstressed second syllable--whose first syllable shares a vowel sound with the profanity.

Et voila! You have a metrically ideal nonsense phrase that people will involuntarily try to picture, disgusting them, delighting you (assuming you're as big a child as I am), and getting you thrown out of restaurants.

Turd burglar.
Ass badger.
Shit brisket.
Fuck nugget.
Twat nozzle.

"Goddamn asshole!" may have long since lost its punch, but I guarantee "son of a cunt smuggler!" will have, if nothing else, the shine of novelty.

The system hasn't failed me yet.

4 comments:

  1. Drill Sergeant Daily had mastered that skill as of 1980, and I'm pretty sure he was operating off of notes his great-great-great-grandfather had written up from a lecture given by Baron von Steuban...

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  2. Heh. I'll have to see if Google Books has a facsimile of his Revolutionary War Profanity Manual.

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  3. Howard Tayler has come up with one of the best, IMHO, with "Crap on a Crutch!"

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  4. I actually laughed out loud at "ass badger".

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