Peaeater

Life in hyperbole. HYPERBOLE, I said!


How to swear like a sailor

Troglodyte! Bashi-bazouk! In my rantiferous odes, I like to assault my foes with polysyllabic violence. Each little part of a long word is like a rat- or a -tat-, so that when I squeeze the mental trigger I can fire long machine-gun bursts of lettery lead at whatever happens to be in my sights that day. Die! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat-a-tat!! I smoke come out you! *

I recognize I have had a long love affair with imaginary violence, yes. One can either suppress or sublimate one's predilections.

That being the case, one of my longstanding heroes has been the bluff, short-tempered Captain Haddock of the Tintin series, prone to outbursts of extremely creative expletives. What he taught me to do is to find difficult words that are not in themselves offensive, but when chained together and thrown into an outburst, carry all the weight and snarling colour of the kind of salty curse that can only be produced after 20 years at sea.

So very satisfying.

Curse and enjoy with this exhaustive (English) list of Captain Haddock's best: http://www.tintinologist.org/guides/lists/curses.html. But don't stop there - it's only to get you warmed up. Comment and hit me with your best shot, you purple pockmarked poltroons! Sea-gherkins! Ostrogoths! Et cetera.

 

* When I was small, Mum did not allow herself to hear me say "I shoot you" so I improvised.

2 Responses to “How to swear like a sailor”

  1. # Ion lad

    Back at you, you festering fleabitten finagler! Latrine lounging long-eared lolligagger!  

  2. # Meandering Michael

    I can't seem to come up with a good Captain Haddock-ism, but once upon a time, a mouthy little kid was calling me names that I'm sure weren't uttered in his house. My response was to tell him that he had deoxyribonucleic acid in his body. Clueless that DNA wasn't actually a BAD thing, he stormed off in a huff. He was in way over his head.

    He went and told on me to his mom (He was much younger than I, you see). She phoned me up in a huff and demanded to know what I had said to him. I told her exactly what I said and then suggested that she ask her son to tell her the names he had called me.

    Minutes later, I received another call from the kid's mom. This time to apologise.

    Addlepated adenine! Great gobs of guanine! Castors of concentrated cytosine! Tiny tumblers of Thymine! Millions of masticating mitochondrion! Blubbering base pairs! Myriads of mitosis!

    Howzabout that?! I just needed a little inspiration!  

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