Colin Burrow reviews the book by Melissa Mohr in the London Review of Books:
Roll up, roll up all you ‘mangie rascals, shiteabed scoundrels, drunken roysters, slie knaves, drowsie loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly lowts … fondling fops, base lowns, saucie coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing Braggards, noddie meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddi-poljolt-heads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, slutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninnie-hammer flycatchers, noddiepeak simpletons, turdie gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets’. As these few tasters from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais indicate, swearing can be fun: ‘slabberdegullion druggels’ (slovenly dimbos) and ‘noddie meacocks’ (limp-wristed wimps) have the surreal energy of abuse forged in the heat. But Urquhart’s list of obscenities does gradually tail off. ‘Shitten shepherds’ is tired and formulaic. It’s time to move on. Foulness quickly becomes boring. Really good swearing relies on formulaic elements, but needs to be precisely adapted to the moment. In this respect dear old Robin in the 1960s Batman TV series was one of the best swearers, though his lips were never soiled with a common-or-garden profanity. He could combine ‘Holy’ with more or less anything in order to create his trademark ejaculations, which were always to the point. Number two in my list of all-time favourites is ‘Holy chocolate éclair!’ Number one has to be ‘Holy uncanny photographic mental processes!’
You can see how difficult it is to swear really well by asking a computer to do it. Those with masochistic tendencies might seek out the verbal rough-housing on offer from the potty-mouthed webservers at foulomatic.hnldesign.nl or the more tastily named sweary.com. The results, though, are disappointing. A true poet of the foul would never have come up with the computer’s ersatz ‘toe erection’, or its ‘son of a wank biscuit slapper’, though I confess that I had to look up ‘biscuit’ in a slang dictionary to discover its filth potential: ‘ass’ is the relevant sense, though it can apparently also function in similar ways to the British English slang use of ‘crumpet’.
More here.
