Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter I
2. Contents V
3. Foreword VII
4. Part I: Othering and abjection as deep practice
5. 1. “I will kill you today” – Reading “bad language” and swearing through Otherness, mimesis, abjection and camp 1
6. 2. Ten issues facing taboo word scholars 37
7. 3. “Damn your eyes!” (Not really): Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands 53
8. 4. “Oh, bald father!”: Kinship and swearing among Datooga of Tanzania 79
9. 5. Aesthetics of the obscure: Swearing as horrible play 103
10. 6. “I sh.t in your mouth”: Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa) 121
11. Part II: Cultural mobility as context of transgression
12. 7. The linguistics of Jamaican swearing: Forms, background and adaptations 147
13. 8. ‘Don’t say it in public’: Contestations and negotiations in northern Nigerian Muslim cyberspace 165
14. 9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers’ offensive language use and verbal hostility 185
15. 10. The name of the wild man: Colonial arbiru in East Timor 209
16. Part III: Disruptive and trashy performance
17. 11. Found and lost paradise: Bad language at a beach in Diani, Kenya 239
18. 12. The sexy banana – artifacts of gendered language in tourism 259
19. 13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers’ use of rude vocatives 281
20. 14. “He shall not be buried in the West” – Cursing in Ancient Egypt 303
21. Afterword 327
22. Index 333