The late American comic, George Carlin, earned considerable notoriety for a bit he developed in the 1970s entitled, “The Seven Words You Never Hear on Television,” a shortlist of “dirty words” that censors of the American broadcast networks proscribed from the airwaves. There were others, of course, but the shunning of this indecent, indecorous seven made us, children of the 70s, at least in part, the curious prudes and hypocrites that we are today—me, anyway. Not that one didn’t, and doesn’t use them, even with some frequency at times, and to great relief and effect, but that when they drop from my lips, especially in a setting that can be described as “public,” I pause, as if a striped-shirted discourse official might appear and whistle a technical foul. Anymore, these days, it has to be flagrant.
But vulgarity, obscenity, indecency, and malediction provide insight into a language and a culture, as much as its standard literary expression; and a brief foray into the subject, between academic semesters, would seem the time. Hence, I make these preliminary observations after some more than cursory but less than completely thorough surveys of my authorities, the Kosciuszko Dictionary and the naughty and pseudonymous Stanislaw Kielbasa’s Dictionary of Polish Obscenities. The seven words that you would not have heard on American network TV in the 1970s I would identify as the following: gowno, siki, jebac, cipa, mineciara, jebaka, and cyc.
Gowno (goov-na) and siki are noun forms, the results of our indelicate excretories, the latter, siki, interestingly, is in the plural, the liquid collective. The verb forms generating these end products would seem multiple in Polish. Thus, English is more economical; we take half the syllables to crudely articulate our business, and our monosyllables serve as both noun and verb forms. For power, you want brevity in your maledicta. The f-bomb in English I’ve rendered with the verb form jebac (yea-batch), though I could have chosen dupczyc (dub-chich) and ruchac (roo-chach), as well. In the Kosciuszko all three carry the same primary effing definition; “screw” appears second, though seemingly almost synonymous, of course carrying less socio-linguistic opprobrium. Street research will be required to further elucidate the relative power and the appropriate contexts for the apparent manifold forms of the nasty, but again, the options seem more nuanced, less reductive, and thus, gentler. Cipa (chi-pa) feels more feminine than its counterpart in English, vulgar, yes, but softer and mossier. While in the English a particularly ugly word and insult, mineciara refers to the feminine noun form, though the root noun, mineta refers generally to “oral sex”; context, apparently, would determine the specific act, actor, and nature of the insult. Jebaka, though a feminine noun, refers to the masculine actor, though nowhere, even in Kielbasa, do I find the scurrilous addition of matka (“mother”), matkajebaka, to the epithet; though both the alliteration and assonance would creditably replicate the English. As for cyc (tsits), as Carlin originally observed, it shouldn’t even be on the list.
The most popular, or perhaps populous, ribald category in the Dictionary of Polish Obscenities would be those terms referring to the male member, numbering well over a hundred entries. Slangy and obviously metaphoric, they include the Polish words for cannon, banana, bolt, wire, flute, fife, pipe, gland, cable, canary, corporal, hooded monk, bearded man, clarinet, candlewick, rooster, horse, root, tassel, stick, cane, lollipop, barrel, tail, stake, trombone, bell, digit, gun, bird, python, bar, and rascal. Among the more imaginative or felicitous are grzechomierz (“sin-meter”), chabeta (“old horse”), dyndala (“dangler”), and cygaro z bakami (“cigar with sideburns”). I suspect the compiler of this reference work guilty of no little phallocentrism, given that his pseudonym, Kielbasa, is itself on the list.
By contrast, one counts fewer than half that number of references to the Venusian mystery, with many diminutive derivations of a few basic terms. Above cipa, we find a few standard mammary images: balcony, train bumpers, flower pots, knockers, udders, rolls, the twins, and big blue eyes (duze niebieskie oczy). Bar mleczny (“milk bar”) puns off of Communist-era “bars” that specialized in dairy products, social establishments intended to combat alcoholism. Strangely, another term for cyc is przedsiewziecie (“enterprise”), the root for the Polish word for “entrepreneur.” I have no idea.
