Friday, September 01, 2017

Foreign Curse Words

How many of us can't speak a foreign language but we do know a few curse words in some?  I wonder why that is??  I was in a little store yesterday and overheard an old guy asking the young salesman if he knew what fung... (Italian for f..k) meant.  There were only the 3 of us in the store and the salesman cautioned the old man to be careful what he said.  The old guy replied that no-one knew what that word meant.

I said, "I do".

You could have knocked that old man over with a feather and he couldn't apologize to me enough.  Then he assumed I spoke Italian and began talking to me in Italian.  I stopped him, saying I spoke only English but had learned that word when I was in my teens.

I remember a bunch of my girlfriends hanging out with some good looking Italian boys back in the mid 1950's.  They were recent immigrants and laughed themselves silly as they taught us some Italian swear words.  While we never would have said those words out loud in those days, we thought it hilarious to speak them out loud in Italian.  Somehow it wasn't really like swearing.

I never thought then that knowing a few swear words in Italian would give me such a good laugh 60+ years in the future.

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