Andrew Brown points us to an illuminating article by Bernard Nežmah on swearing in Serbian. Though the article is five years old, I daresay its theme is timeless.

According to Nežmah’s piece — published in Central Europe Review or, as we must now call it, Transitions Online — the Serbian language is blessed with a dazzling, perhaps unsurpassed richness of vulgarisms. Even English, no slouch at that sort of thing, pales in comparison: such are the subtleties of the Serbian variants on the F-word that Serbian-English dictionaries (the more comprehensive editions, one imagines) are reduced to explaining in an aside whether a given word for ‘fuck’ is jocularly offensive, just plain offensive, really really offensive, so offensive it should be used only in the event of war, etc.

A tip of the jaunty afoe fedora to Andrew (who surprises us by revealing he used to speak Serbo-Croat in addition to English, Swedish, Caenorhabditic and whatever else he has up his sleeve).