Your guide to international insults

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5449-2003Apr10.html

Worst Foot Forward: A Guide to Foreign Insults

By Linton Weeks

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, April 11, 2003; Page C01

First the crowd of Iraqis sledgehammer the sculpture of Saddam Hussein. With the help of American soldiers, they yank it to the ground and drag the severed head through the streets. And then, in a gesture of pure cultural insult, they begin pounding the stew out of the statue with their shoes.

A mustachioed man whacks the icon with his sandal. Another presses his laced sneaker into the huge forehead. A boy pummels the statue with pink shoes.

It is one of the strongest insults in the Arab world -- sticking the sole of your shoe in somebody's face, in a culture where the foot is considered the dirtiest part of the body. And flogging someone with your footwear, says Georgetown University Arab studies professor Samer Shehata, is a certain-sure symbol of disrespect.

So that explains why Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf said that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush "only deserve to be hit with shoes."

He's adding insole to injury.

In this ever-shrinking garden of cross-cultural pollination, it's not a bad idea to know that various societies have varying notions of insultitude. If we're ever going to get along, we should at least try to understand each other's snipes and slights.

"There isn't really a strict hierarchy of insults" in the Middle East, Shehata says. But sole-flashing is up there. So is slapping somebody up the back of the neck.

"That's considered quite insulting," he says. "You're not hurting the other person physically; you're hurting them symbolically."

Honking the car horn, he says, is not considered bad manners. It's merely a signal that you're turning or passing. "The horn is more important than indicators in the Middle East," he says.

World travelers will tell you that the thumbs-up sign in one culture will get you strung up in another. An American's "okay" sign, made by touching the tip of the thumb to the tip of the forefinger, in Latin America is like flipping the bird. If you hitchhike in Israel, don't use your thumb -- point your finger in the direction you want to go. Don't tap people on the head in the Buddhist world. Don't touch anyone with your left hand in North Africa. In Mongolia, you can't lean on the supporting pole of someone's yurt. In Japan, let the cabdriver open your door. In France, pressing a thumb against the fingertips and holding them in front of your face means something is ooh-la-la parfait; in Egypt, the same action means "Hold your damn horses!" Don't give someone in China a gift containing vinegar. In some countries, flicking your thumb across the teeth tells the other person he's a cheapskate. In others, the "V" sign can be negative, not positive. In just about every part of the planet, grabbing the crook of your elbow and raising your fist is not nice.

And again in the Arab world, Shehata says, the middle finger pointed downward and moving up and down, with palm horizontal, means approximately the same thing as a raised middle finger around here.

He says: "The way culture works is: There aren't formal rules. This isn't written everywhere. These are things everyone knows."

Some disses are universal. Showing someone your naked bottom, says anthropologist David B. Givens, dates back many many millenniums, even before the time of Mel Gibson as Braveheart. The thrusting out of the buttocks, he says, "is a supreme insult. It evolved from a defecation kind of message."

Pounding things, such as shoes, also taps the deep-heat memory in our reptilian brain. Spoken language is only about 200,000 years old, he says, but some of our gestures stretch back millions of years. "They have animal roots."

Another gesture that tracks all the way back to reptilian days is the "high-stand display." The reaction, Givens explains, ricochets through mammals and primates back to reptiles that pushed up on forelimbs to seem taller, to defy gravity, to loom.

Also from the paleo-circuits of our brain come mood-driven movements, such as overhand beating with the palm held down. "That's one of those things that's unlearned," Givens says. "It's not something that's cultural. It's universal."

Once man could speak, he learned to insult verbally. "A knot you are of damned bloodsuckers," wrote William Shakespeare, the master of insults.

Traviss Willcox, who lives in England, collects insults from all over the world on his Web site, www.insults.net. "The most popular part of the site," he says, "is the 'How to swear in a foreign language' part." He suggests that people may want to know how to insult people and not be understood.

The shoe-wielding Iraqis wanted to be understood. "Getting an insult through words is not as insulting fundamentally as getting something visually," Givens says.

He recalls Khrushchev taking off his shoe and pounding it on a table at the United Nations.

To Givens, shoes are among the most expressive of nonverbal-insult tools. "In ancient times," he says, "men would etch the silhouette of their enemies on the bottom of their sandals. So they could walk on them."

that

insults.net is pretty cool.

Now you can really tell the French off

http://www.insults.net/html/swear/french.html