Bryson - really Malay have no native swear words?? apa kejadah ni?? #$&*_^

"The FCC and the S word" (1/25/2004) "The S-word and the F-word" (6/12/2004) "You taught me language, and my profit on't/ it, I know how to curse" (7/17/2005) "Curses!" (7/20/2005) "Goram motherfrakker!" (6/7/2006) "The history of typographical bleeping" (6/10/2006) "The earliest typographically-bleeped F-word" (6/15/2006) "Avoiding the other F-word" (7/4/2006) "C*m sancto spiritu" (8/7/2006) [And, courtesy of amazon.com, here's the passage on p. 214 of The Mother Tongue where Bill Bryson exhibits his gullibility and/or ignorance of Finnish: Some cultures don't swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2:00 A.M., rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa. It means "in the restaurant". Given how badly Bryson got taken by the Finnish restaurant gag, it'd be smart not to trust his word on Japanese, Malay, or American Indian languages either. And indeed, a bit of web searching turns up plenty of information about cussing in all of these.] Posted by Mark Liberman at August 30, 2006 07:24 AM source: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003521.html