fart-chicken
Sandra Dodd
VT: Can you leave us with one of your favorite insults from the book?
SD: There's the Icelandic word prumphænsn, which means 'fart-chicken.'
Its glorious unexpectedness is half the fun. Fart-chicken!
That's the end of an interview with one of the authors of a new book :
Want to insult someone in Japanese? Try misokakku ('scum of soya
paste'). In Polish, try motyla noga ('butterfly's leg'), and in
Turkish, muhallebi çocuğu('child of pudding'). These and hundreds of
other colorful put-downs from around the world can be found in the
delightful new book, Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit by Stephen Dodson
and Dr. Robert Vanderplank. We spoke about the book with Dodson, known
to many language lovers by his nom de blog, Languagehat.
The article is here:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/1947/
SD: There's the Icelandic word prumphænsn, which means 'fart-chicken.'
Its glorious unexpectedness is half the fun. Fart-chicken!
That's the end of an interview with one of the authors of a new book :
Want to insult someone in Japanese? Try misokakku ('scum of soya
paste'). In Polish, try motyla noga ('butterfly's leg'), and in
Turkish, muhallebi çocuğu('child of pudding'). These and hundreds of
other colorful put-downs from around the world can be found in the
delightful new book, Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit by Stephen Dodson
and Dr. Robert Vanderplank. We spoke about the book with Dodson, known
to many language lovers by his nom de blog, Languagehat.
The article is here:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/1947/