Behavior: Insult Artistry

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Perfecting Verbal Abuse

Reinhold Aman is the name in pejoration, not to mention invective, vituperation, obloquy, opprobrium, objurgation, abusive epithets and billingsgate. Aman, 41, is the editor of Maledicta, the International Journal of Verbal Aggression, which he publishes irregularly out of his home in Waukesha, Wis. He can curse in 200 languages and, with the possible exception of Don Rickles, he is the only American who makes a full-time living out of insults.

His goal is grandiose: to collect and analyze every offensive term ever used on the planet, and to make Aman synonymous with malediction the world over. Says he: "I've spent eleven years on it, day and night, working like a demented beaver because so much has to be done."

The first issue of Maledicta ("bad words" in Latin) is now in the hands of 1,480 subscribers who pay $10 per year. It contains scholarly dissertations on such subjects as Yiddish insults, scurrilous Elizabethan and Jacobean sexual metaphors, and Latent Accusative Tendencies in the Skopje Dialect. Other articles include a bracing harangue by Aman himself, directed at academics who do not appreciate his life's work ("biodegradable nitwits" and "cacademoids," a neologism formed from "academic" and the baby-talk word for feces, "caca"). The coat of arms of his International Maledicta Society is a 3,000-year-old obscene Egyptian insult in hieroglyphic.

Aman thinks cussing is socially important—It releases pent-up emotions and reveals crucial information about culture and psychology. Among other things, he is studying the language of German prostitutes and Peruvian criminals, American college slang, Mojave insult gestures and the terminology of Chinese eunuchs. In an Olympics of world cursing, he believes that Yiddish would rank high, and Hungarian would win the blasphemy prize hands down. Also notable are Turkish rhymed insults, deadly serious Eskimo singing duels and a sneaky insult in Hindi that translates literally as "brother-in-law" but actually means "I slept with your sister." In general, says Aman, Anglo-Saxon cultures prefer insults dealing with excrement and body parts, Catholic countries are fond of blasphemy, and cultures of the Middle and Far East are partial to ancestor insults.

Americans, Aman says, are "generally very poor at swearing. They just don't know how to do it, and usually fall back on the same 24 words or so." What talent there is in the U.S. apparently is found in rural areas and the Deep South. "There you get concrete vivid images that come out of a strong oral tradition—Billy Carter is a good example. City dwellers' vocabularies are very anemic."

Aman has a tip for Americans wishing to improve their verbal-abuse techniques: "Look for a distinguishing characteristic. Each of us is deviant in some way. For instance, I wear glasses, I'm five-foot-seven, 20 pounds overweight, have short hair and a Kissinger accent. So you could start off calling me a fat, four-eyed, runty, reactionary, sewer-mouth Kraut." Still, he considers it unsporting, and sometimes destructive, for cursers to pick on physical characteristics. Says he: "Insults should be aimed at behavior, something a person can change."