Language sure can be funny sometimes.
One of the things I’ve learned from both studying other languages and teaching English is that insults never tend to translate very well. The words may pack a big punch in their native tongue, but just sound silly in another language.A rather harsh one (given the history between the two countries) in Korean is “your mother is Japanese.” Yeah, that’ll piss a Korean off all right. But say you were in the U.S. and said it to another American. They might get a bit irked, but it’s more likely to confuse them.
Similarly, insults regarding one’s mental state are rather brutal to a Korean. Call somebody “crazy” or (god forbid) “psycho,” and they’ll be ready to fight. (You can double your insult’s effectiveness by calling somebody’s mother a “psycho.” Just so you know.)
But when you take it at face value in English, “crazy” really isn’t that bad. Hell, it’s a compliment in some circles. “Dude, you just pulled a 50-50 grind all the way down that rail! You’re crazy!”
Rather than go out of my way to adjust how I speak, I prefer to try and get my students to understand that what may be very bad in Korean, isn’t that bad – or bad at all – in English. They don’t always get it.
Part of the problem comes from how they learn certain words. They’re told (or find in a dictionary) that “미친” means “crazy.” And while it does on one level, the meaning in English isn’t nearly as severe. But the students get it in their heads that the English word packs just as much of a punch as the Korean, and won’t see it any other way.
There are other benefits to this as well. They think that these mostly innocuous words in English are just as rude as the Korean ones, so they don’t (usually) ask me to teach them bad words in English. Not that I would, but it keeps the matter from being brought up too often.
It also lets me slam them pretty effectively without worrying about teaching them any profanity. I can call a kid “psycho” and it gets to them just as much as “cocksucker” would to a native speaker. (I find it also helps if I think the bad word while saying the mild one. Fortunately, I haven’t (and hopefully never will) mixed up which word to say and which one not to say.)However, instead of simply repeating the ones back that they think are bad, I’m looking for new and improved things to say, so I’m taking suggestions for new insults and putdowns. Here’s the deal, they can’t be profane, and the more nonsensical they are, the better. I can just see the looks of stunned confusion now:
Student: Teacher, you’re crazy.
Me: I know, but you’ve got musket hair.
Student: O.o ???
Non-sequiturs rule. Anybody got any good ones?