Ill start:
“Me cago en tus muertos” - ill shit all over your dead relatives. Spanish.
Teletubbyzurückwinker.
Someone that waves back at the Teletubbies.
This is by far the best one.
No harsh words or vulgarity but lots of emotional damage.
Schnitzelkind. Breaded-veal kid (wienerschnitzel / milanesa). Basically a kid so ugly, that the parents needed to put a schnitzel around his neck so that at least the dogs would play with him.
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Mieren neuker
Bravo! A perfect write-up. You’re making us proud.
Heya. I’m an American, and I’ve got to say thank you. I seriously look forward to calling someone a “ball violin” in English, but if fully intend to add klootviool and and klootzak to my day to day swear bank. Those are so satisfying to say!
Just don’t forget that the “oo” is pronounced as the “oh” in “oh shit” and not like the “oo” in “cool” or “mood”. Same for the “a” in “zak”. It’s closer to “ahhh” as in “oooohh and ahhh” or “pasta” than it is to the “a” in “back”
I also quite like the word ‘droeftoeter’, meaning a sad/depressing person. The closest thing would be the word ‘loser’ in English.
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‘Sad trombone’ would be an apt translation, as the sound of refers to is exactly like the meaning of the insult.
Nice overview! I do not have any proof of this, but I think “Godverdomme”, which is still very common, is a bit unique because rather that God damning it or -you, it translates to God Damn Me.
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In Quebec French, people sometimes say of someone who’s not particularly bright:
“His mom rocked him/her too close to the wall.”
It’s just so… vivid and random.
A strong insult in french would be to tell that someone has been “fini à la pisse”.
I don’t know how to translate that but it would means that their dad did not have enough sperm so he used urine to conceive them.
Oh cool, we have a very similar one in German: “His/her swing stood too close to the wall.”
Bizarre j’ai jamais entendu ça…
C’est bien connu en France:
Il a été bercé trop près du mur.
Mieux vaut tard que jamais pour l’ajouter à mon arsenal d’insulte 😁
My personal favourites from Finnish.
“Ei ole kaikki muumit Muumilaaksossa” “Not having all the Moomins in Moomin Valley” Used for people who are either stupid or lack sanity. There are other variants of this and Moomin one is not older than a couple of decades.
I find our version of Grammar Nazi pretty great. We call them comma fuckers.
“Ei voi kauhalla ottaa jos on lusikalla annettu” “You can’t take with a ladle if it was given with a spoon”. This refers also to a lack of something, usually a lack of intelligence or sense.
“Not having all the Moomins in Moomin Valley”
That’s totally something we’ll use. Thanks :D Also I’m stealing that. I’m stealing that insult and Americanizing it and you can’t stop me
Just be warned Moomins are a gateway to communism (Weird internet theory). Or at least to more Moomins. We literally have Moomin everything here.
In Denmark you have:
- Paragraph Knight - someone who cares too much about rules and regulations.
- Fly Fucker - someone who cares too much about something deeply insignificant.
In German there is “Paragraphenreiter” - Paragraph rider.
Băga-mi-aș pula-n coliva mă-tii de să-mi sară coaiele din bomboană-n bomboană
This is a highly niche one in my native language as well, as one must also know what is colivă - it’s basically a desert that we eat at funerals with m&m-sized candies in it as well. So it roughly translates let me stick my dick in your mother’s coliva so hard that my balls jump from candy to candy
That is elaborate, vulgar, and 100% delightful. I love hearing stuff like this. Cursing in American English is so boring lol
Does the insult mean the colivā is served at your mother’s funeral, or that it’s the colivā your mother made? Also in what kind of context you use this insult?
I’m not the OP but usage is dealer’s choice. It’s smooth jazz all the way down.
In the dialect of the Italian province I’m from, my favorite insult is “Perdabàll”, which literally means “balls loser” as someone who’s so stupid and useless that could even manage to lose his testicles
I thought you were gonna say it means someone who’s married.
No but for that we use another genital: we say “S’é infigá” which roughly translates to “He got pussy-ed”, meaning someone that got enslaved by a vagina
When a man balds at a young age, we say ‘they were still shaving his mom when he was born’
Pretty brutal, eh ?
I dont get it.
They shaved the private parts of women before giving birth back then. (Maybe it’s still a thing somewhere today, I don’t know.)
Li mortacci tua!
In Italian when you can’t swear with a “vaffanculo” (f you) you can say “vai a quel paese” that’s “go to that country” And specifically in Milanese dialect you can also say “va a ciapà i rat” “go catching rats”
In Aemilia we have the much better “c’at vegna un cancher”, “may you be ill”
Un mio amico diceva “che ti venga un cancro al culo” adesso capisco dove l’ha sentita
“Ge zijt a foorwijf”
You are a fair bitch. People working the carnival / fair scene don’t have the best of reputation. In Belgium we had a song about this phenomenon and the real fair people were all kinds of angry about the stereotype. The thing is about stereotypes: it really has a base in reality.
Not really an insult but:
“Hänellä ei taida olla kaikki muumit laaksossa”
“They don’t seem to have all moomin in the valley”When someone is talking crazy, etc
That’s not exact:
- Me cago en tus muertos = I shit on your ancestors / I shit on your dead relatives.
- Me cago en todos tus muertos = I shit on all of your ancestors / I shit on all of your dead relatives.
And in the theme of insults from Spain, a loaded one is also: Me cago en tu puta madre = I shit on your fucking mother / I shit on your whore mother
See, the thing with “puta/puto” is that it literally means “whore”, but it’s used to empathize cursings just like “fucking” is used in english. We’re even misusing it by putting it before verbs, imitating it’s use in english.
三小 in Taiwanese literally translates as “what sperm?” But it means “what the fuck”.
the full saying is 看三小/看啥小
literally “see what semen?”
meaning more like “the f*** you looking at?”
There’s a good one in Cantonese I learned from Hong Kong movies. It translates to “Are you talking?” but the implication is “You’re making noise, but is that supposed to be human speech?” Lei guuung yeieh!?
Yiddish is not my native language but I think this one is so good it absolutely deserves a mention:
All of your teeth shall fall out except one that gives you a massive toothache.
Portuguese is full of these, but how about vai pra casa do caralho.
Which roughly translates to “go to the dick’s home”, basically another way of saying “go fuck yourself”, but even more vulgar somehow.
Portuguese here. “Diz que vais cagar e baza”, which translates to “Say you go shit and get outa here”, when someone is not welcome.
Brazil “eu caguei e andei” (I shat and walked). Functionally equivalent to “I don’t give a shit” but in Portuguese one actually shits but doesn’t care to wipe and walks away or walks at the same as is shitting.
Oh, another one: “deves comer gelados com a testa”, which translates to “you must eat icecream with your forehead”, a not so soft way to call someone stoopid
I’ve heard ‘caralho’ used to be the name for the lookout on top of a ship’s mast (later turned into yet another word for dick) and sailors were sent to duty on the caralho as punishment?
I’m not Portuguese though, so if any native could confirm …