This afternoon as I stood in line at the Post Office I overheard two women talking about someone they both knew who had done something particularly unpleasant to another mutual acquaintance.
One of the women quipped in the course of the conversation that she hoped "his dick rotted like a month old banana."
Needless to say, I literally had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. The urge to high-five that woman for such a colorful curse was nearly overwhelming.
Afterward, as I drove back to the house, I thought about how much of a shame it is that people don't curse creatively more often.
Curses have gone the way of the laudatory blessing, which is, I suppose, fitting, as curses and blessings are the opposite sides of a very fickle coin.
Nowadays, people want to be derogatory towards someone, it's usually a quick "Fcuk 'em!"
Which is not creative, and dreadfully boring, and just plain lazy.
There was a time when people cursed, and writers wrote curses, and actors spoke curses in the dialogue of well-written movies.
The first curse I can recall hearing was the classic "May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits." Klinger said that on an episode of M*A*S*H. Of course now I know it's a timeless classic, but at the time I didn't - I just thought it was a riot.
For awhile it seemed like almost all of the literature I was exposed to contained at least one good curse, and so did a great number of the movies I watched.
That must of been due to the fact that I read a lot of old classic fiction, and watched a lot of old classic films.
Thinking about creative curses got me thinking of some of the curses I had chanced upon in my youth. Here are some of my favorite curses of all time, with attribution if I can recall where I heard or read it (I will not be delving into Google to seek out the true originator of any of these curses, I'm just going to write where I heard or read them first):
"You misbegotten offspring of questionable parentage." That was from an issue of Conan written by Roy Thomas. I have no idea if it originated with him, but that's where I first read it.
"May you fall into the cesspool of an outhouse at a Grateful Dead show just before the bad brownies hit the intestines of the Deadheads who drank all the bad spiked cider." T.J., a guy I was in the USAF with said that once. T.J. was one funny dude.
"May your wedding feast give you the runs on your wedding night." That's a traditional Irish curse I heard from a girl named Gemma when I was living in Glasgow (She wasn't saying it to me, just telling me it).
"May you be able to heat your home from the heartburn caused by your wife's cooking." Is a Jewish curse I heard years ago from a half-Jewish, half-Protestant guy I met in a youth hostel in London. We were playing trivial pursuit and he was losing badly when he said it.
"May your son fall in love with a nice Jewish Doctor!" used to be a common Jewish curse. Hard to imagine it still carrying the weight it once did. I don't recall where I first heard that - might have been in a movie.
"May The Bird Of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose" is a funny one from a Country song by Jimmy Dickens. Mr. Meyers had that song on one of his 3 hour long reel-to-reel tapes.
I was raised in Southeast San Diego, and at the time it was a predominately black neighborhood. I heard a lot of great insults back then, but not a lot of great curses. The only insult I ever heard that was even close to a curse was "I hope your mama makes you take a bath so we can see how white you really are." That was one black guy speaking to another, btw.
My maternal ancestry is Lithuanian and I've done a bit of research on the people and culture of Lithuania, and while there is a lot of interesting stuff there, cursing is not, shall we say, a practiced art among the Lithuanians.
Lithuanians just aren't much for serious cursing. Their curses seem a bit silly, actually. A classic example is "May you drown in a spoon."
What's that supposed to mean? Are you hoping somebody shrinks to a size that allows for drowning in a spoon? Is it a wish that a person should trip and fall into a Giant's spoon and thus drown? I don't get it.
That's probably my curse, not getting it. I pissed off a Gypsy in Barcelona one evening, and she spat something at me that I roughly translated as "May your brain be dwarfed by a grain of sand."
That's gotta be it.
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