Some Nasty Words

Nasty Words We Don’t Appreciate

November 25, 2009

Professor Fish has a recent New York Times commentary on phrases such as “Use Other Door” (when you have just walked around a block-long building only to find what you know to be the usual main entrance closed, “The Role of Arabella Will be Sung Tonight by Her Understudy,” (when you’ve been looking forward to Renée Fleming and bought the tickets three months ago), “Closed for Private Party,” (when all day long you’ve been dreaming about dinner with your young lady at Clancy’s tonight), “To Be Continued,” (when you’ve invested an hour and a half of your time and emotional purchase in this TV show and now you may not for a week, a month, or ever, see the end). Some of his, his readers’, and my own are more than mildly amusing: “this may hurt a little” (dentist), “user name denied,” (a deep insult), “may I help you?” (ironic; from a security guard who’s spotted you wandering off from the group and has no intention of “helping” you); “I’m sorry, but I don’t recognize your response” (from a machine; no wonder, because you probably have just cursed it); “the doctor will be with you in a minute” (the hell he will, sports fans), “we sure don’t” (in answer, by a Southerner, to the query: “Have you got ___?), “speak clearly as our menu choices have changed” (another insult presupposing my stupidity, my inarticulateness, my neanderthal ways; note the smug conjunction ‘as’ — the bastards), “pardon our progress” (you preen yourself on the sawdust and trash and mess you make and congratulate yourself for endangering me). From meterologists I dislike “as well,” when drawn out to cover fifteen seconds of air time, as in “and the sub-normal temperatures will be in evidence tomorrow across the region, and the next day a--a--a z--z we-e-l-l (end on a cheerily rising intonation, suggesting a mad-Hatter hysteria).

Fish’s readers go on and on and so might we. You’ve gone through the menu choices twice, into three sub-sub-menus, vainly seeking the exit to a human voice. Finally you get the eternal spin-back: “To return to the previous menu, press 1; to return to the main sub-menu, press 5; to return to the main menu, press star or hold the line” (the depth of human insult lying in this calculatingly smug presumption: “you fool, you couldn’t find what you needed here; well, we don’t need your tiresome presence, and if you are simply stupid, you may try again and again.” As the gatekeeper said to Kafka’s protagonist in Vor dem Gesetz: “This gate was built especially for you.”

The big winner among Fish’s readers was “No problem,” the fashionable, bullet-brained way to say “you’re welcome” by not saying that at all and implying, again, your own inappropriate thank-you or your own stupid assumption. Garrison Keiller spoofed this: “I told my bartender when he finished my martini, ‘thanks, and don’t say: 'no problem.’ He thought this over and said: ‘Whatever.’”

We still say “you’re welcome,” but people in ‘the service business’ and people who often deal with the public don’t. They say “no problem.” In Italian, they still say “prego,” which I think is пожалуйста in Russian, both ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, as well as ‘here you are’, ‘here you go,’, ‘come right in’, etc. (you were wondering how I’d get Russian in this thing, were you not?). You can say ничего a-a-z-z w-e-e-l-l, but it’s not quite the same absolutely correct and appropriate thing to say.

There's another infuriating Russian phrase that old guys like me learned when they just started out with Russian: как вы поживаете?, which was inaccurately and falsely given as the equivalent to "How are you?" It is not. It means "how are you living, i. e. how are you getting on, how is it going? and it begs, I mean begs, for an answer. In our Начало textbook there's a funny moment when Саша comes to visit Света and Таня in their room and he says the above phrase, and Света answers very quickly and with an ironic smile, Хорошо поживаем, а ты как поживаешь? She ain't interested in going over personal affairs right now, Сашка. Of course there is no exact way to say "How are you?" unless, perhaps, Good Day, Добрый день, which, American style, needs no response. Как дела? can be flippantly answered "Как сажа бела," 'just like soot is white', another excellent brush-off (note that бела rhymes with дела).

In French you can elegantly toss “pas de quoi”, “de rien”, or elegantly indeed, “mon plaisir, c’était mon propre plaisir, monsieur.” In Czech you may say, moving from the inelegant, near-to-no-problem to the sublimely ironic: za nic ‘for nothing’, za málo ‘for little’. You may say prosím literally the same as prego, I ask, I beg, and it is a humble and ordinary phrase,used, by the way, by all Czechs who deal with the public. "No problem" would be recongized as an insult. In Russian you could say прошу, просим but that is out of use in this sense now. Answering the telephone a Czech will say his or her last name, and follow that with ‘prosím’, ‘ I am listening, go ahead please’. My son hastens to remind me of the irritating Czech phrase 'ale prosím tě', 'but I beg you, please; come on, now', often spoken in a wheedling tone. At the high end of set phrases is the superb Czech translation from German ‘gern geschehen’, literally ‘it happened gladly’, ‘I was glad to do it’: rádo se stalo. This phrase is very well suited to chanting by a huge crowd, as happened in November, 1989, almost exactly twenty years ago, when the Velvet Revolution toppled the Czechoslovak communist state. The crowd rattled their keys and tinkled little bells — they ‘cinkali’, as the phrase has it.

An exhilarating way to end this catalog with overarching irony. A small revenge over the brainless idiots of bureaucracy. Rádo se stalo!

Rádo se stalo! Rádo se stalo! Rádo se stalo! Rádo se stalo! Repeat, printer, to the bottom of the page.

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