(1210) Swear words

Swearing is like smoking. One can easily pick it up from family members and people around either at home or in school.

I had a Chemistry professor who said "sugar!" whenever she got flustered or upset. Most people would utter "sh*t" in undertone. My lab buddy, however, chose to say "shark!" whenever her experiments were going to pieces. We were doing organic chemistry experiments that were long, complicated and it was often tedious to get satisfactory result.

Here in a corner of Borneo, Chinese school boys say "Da bien" (sh*t) in abandon. I hear it in bus stops, shops near secondary schools. Interestingly, my son claimed that some of them limit such swear words to outside of the parental orbit. There is a tuition centre in my housing estate. Children were utilising hand phone to call for rides, often they play games and talk to their friends too. The few times I walked past, conversations were peppered with very colourful language, either in Mandarin or Cantonese.

Just a few days ago, I was commenting about English pronunciation, accent, and ability to persuade. One of the students in my son's tutoring group is 13 years old. He evidently has the gift of the gab. Without trying too hard, he could be witty and sarcastic. I said in passing that if he could improve his Bahasa (the national language, used in the courts), he would make a good lawyer. He laughed and said that would be over his parents' dead bodies. Somehow Chinese still think that lawyers subvert justice by saving murderers from death sentences. Anyway, he said that he would only get himself into jail should he swear at the judge in court when provoked. Interesting!