What draws you back to the Cellar?

[zippyt]

I even have 3 specialized dictionaries which help you translate obscenities, curse words, and abnormal bodily functions used in all Spanish-speaking countries of the world back to English.

Oh I bet that can be fun around the office , cussing sombody out and calling them "poopy head " in a forien language .

I picked up a few obscure words over-seas in the marines , they ALLways make folks look at me funny when I pull them out !!!

[wolf]

I like to try out words and phrases I have learned from Scritch's multilingual swear list, a most excellent and accurate resource.

I made our Filipina doctor blush.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by wolf

Mari, I will give you the same advice that I give everyone.

Buy a fucking dictionary.

Use it.

That is my amazing, magic secret, revealed for all the world to see.

wolf gives (extra)marital advice now? Whoa.

[Tonchi]

Oh I bet that can be fun around the office , cussing sombody out and calling them "poopy head " in a forien language

On the first day of school, they had an orientation meeting where all the teachers told us what to expect to learn and how the classes would be conducted. The judge teaching the module on court procedures warned that people who are being tried rarely have "polite" vocabularies, yet we would have to translate whatever they said into exactly comparable English, no matter how vile it was. We would also have to interpret autopsy results and rape testimony. Therefore, he said, we would have to learn AND REPEAT ALOUD IN COURT every possible obscene or anatomical word, both in English and Spanish, and if we did not feel we were prepared to do this we had better leave now and not continue with the class. Two people actually did gather up their things and leave. One of them later told the judge that she planned on becoming a nun and doing missionary work in Latin America and she did not want to find out that such words even existed!

The real "fun" of having learned all these words is that nobody can post anything obscene or make up a disgusting screen name, no matter how oblique, which I can't catch and delete on our forum. Likewise if some chicano makes a crude comment and I turn around and tell him what he can do with it, they just about faint from shock

[mrnoodle]

I come to the cellar in waves. I'll be really interested in it for a few months, then kind of meh for a week or two, then come back. I think I left for a few months once, can't remember why. I come back because the people here never fail to make me either laugh or want to kill something. Even when no one's talking about anything that I find interesting, it's still fun to watch the dialogue.

[Bullitt]

Pretty much just the wide variety of people on here that I normally most likely would not get a chance to speak to, or hear opinions from.

Plus I love when ya'll fight.. I go grab a bag of chips, sit back and watch the fire burn.. mmm. Reminds me of Fight Club.. a bit wierd but overall very worth your time.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Spelling lesson of the moment: weird and seize ignore the "I before E except after C, and when sounded like A, as in neighbor and weigh" orthographic rule.

Now if only we can keep everyone mindful of the rule that possessive nouns are formed with 's and possessives of pronouns never use an apostrophe but just an S. This is there to prevent confusion between possessives of pronouns and contractions with pronouns, whose meaning is utterly different -- in case no one's ever explained that to you. Confuses native speakers every day of the week, but that's mostly because they never got it, for whatever reason, in elementary school.

[Bullitt]

If I wanted a grammar lesson, I'd be taking grammar 101 now wouldn't I...

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Swearing in Russian can be particularly entertaining to an English speaker. Russian mat' -- and they "yo'-mama" a lot -- seems polarized about thirty degrees left of what English uses. Not only does it sound fierce to those innocent of Russian, it amuses and bemuses those who are students of it. In no small part because the very favorite, indeed utterly hackneyed but still taken as fighting words, interjection that gets used -- well, we end up being unsure of the actual tense of the verb: is it the past tense or the imperative? They sound and are spelled alike, and it takes a bold and specialized reference work to sort the matter. Said works, such as Maledicta, though their scope is global: dirty words in every known language, have even collected specifically Soviet-era cusswords and phrases, the use of which now may be so dated as be classicist.

Most reference works on Russian verbs skip the verb "ebat'" and etymologically-related ones like "abutit'" with predictable results for us non-native speakers. Guess they don't want us sounding as practiced and nuanced as a pissed-off army starshina. We're left rote-remembering "ëb' tvoyu mat'" or downgrading it to just "ëb' tvoyu" leaving the mat' to be readily understood -- good if you're cussing in a hurry, I suppose -- or euphemistically coming up with any pair of words that begin with E and M, and letting him who hath understanding get it. Example: ëlki matalki, which literally means "fir twigs/laths"... It gets weird about the time the swearer starts using diminutive forms of the E-M words -- and Russian can stack one diminutive on top of another until the desired degree of sugary cutesiness is achieved, presumably leaving the woebegone recipient of such phraseology under the impression it is not his morality that is being attacked, but the enamel of his teeth.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Bullitt

If I wanted a grammar lesson, I'd be taking grammar 101 now wouldn't I...

I amount to Grammar 101; take me as I am.

[Iggy]

Originally Posted by BigV

wolf gives (extra)marital advice now? Whoa.

Only on the Cellar....

[capnhowdy]

DAMN... I didn't realize I was still here.........

[limey]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

... or want to kill something ...

Like a kitten?

[BigV]

Welcome to the Hall of Fame, limey.

[Kittiew0k]

I decided to sign up here after reading a thread that was linked from OCAU and the forum has a broad range of sections. The people seem nice too