Country Slang Quotes

Fuck You Poem #45 Fuck you in slang and conventional English. Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes. Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced. Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste. Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side. Fuck you humidly and icily. Fuck you farsightedly and blindly. Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery. Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill. Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill. Fuck you puce and chartreuse. Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric. Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric. Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of. Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above. Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running. Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning. Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed. Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead. Fuck you at low and high tide. And fuck you astride anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways, bathrooms, or kitchens. Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions. And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true, that bind me, till I forgive you, to you.

I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it. I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.

I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all—and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library—but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very tango itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)

I think of my grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I’m so sad and I can’t really see a way out of what I’m feeling but I’m leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I’m already hurting. I’m not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America.

In 1934, my parents and the aunts and uncles that accompanied them on their return to Germany, stayed with my grandmother and other family members during this difficult time. To get away from the overwhelming stress everyone felt, they took a day’s outing to the grassy countryside known as die Luneburger Heide, which lay about 50 km southeast of Hamburg. North Germany is not known for its good weather, but I heard that on that particular day it was sunny and perfect for a picnic. From their slightly elevated vantage point, they watched a parade of young men in the Hitler Youth march by. As the band played and the Nazi flag fluttered, most of the people got up out of respect… or could it have been from fear? That is, everyone but my family stood up! They were new Americans and proud of their adopted country, so they alone didn’t salute the repressive flag that was paraded by and they certainly didn’t feel that they had to show any loyalty to it. It did not take long before my family was aggressively surrounded by “Nazi Brown Shirts” and confronted for this unpardonable violation. Pretending not to understand German or the importance of the circumstances, they were allowed to depart from the scene, being thought of as uneducated schweinehunde, another derogatory slang word meaning pig-dogs. It seems that this conflict could have been avoided, had they just stood up and paid due deference to the flag. Considering the times, it was lucky that they got away with their little scam. To the Nazis it was not just a game, the swastika represented their new order, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. I don’t know if my family realized how lucky they were, that this incident didn’t escalate. It is interesting to note that civil servants and members of the German military were expected to take oaths pledged to Hitler himself, and not to the Constitution or the German state. Oaths were taken very seriously by members of the German armed forces. They considered them to be part of a personal code of honor. This put the military in a position of personal servitude, making them the personal instrument of Hitler. In September of that year, at the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party rallies, Hitler euphemistically proclaimed that the German form of life would continue for the next thousand years.

Who originates the latest slang terms that are, seemingly overnight, known to every black youth across the country?

Because they write ‘harbor’ instead of ‘harbour’? Then one would have to attribute a language of their own to the Austrians for saying ‘Sessel’ when they mean ‘Stuhl’ [for chair] or turn ‘Januar’ [January] into ‘Janner.’ Because American slang is spoken differently from British slang? That’s true, but in both countries the standard languages are about as identical as ‘Austrian’ and German.”27 What is “American” supposed to communicate to German readers? An accent? But then writings by an author from Glasgow would have to be titled “from the Glaswegian” or those by a writer living in Manchester as “from the Mancunian.” John Lennon’s books would have to be graced with the formulation “from the Liverpudlian” and those by Woody Allen with “from New Yorkish” or, to be more precise, “from the Brooklynese.” If it’s not about accent, is the criterion perhaps geography? Then Germans would have to use “from the Canadian” or “from the New Zealander

Every band is a foreign country, with its peculiar customs and dialects, slang and standards. But every band is also (when it works) a small business, a romance, an employer/employee dynamic, a hierarchy, a creative collaboration, and something between a family—siblings or cousins, sometimes literally—and a gang.

With the meal there was karaoke. As the Chinese waiters brought the food, everyone at the restaurant sang “shanson,” the gravelly, syrupy gangster ballads that have become some of Russia’s favorite pop music. Shanson reflect the gangsters’ journeys to the center of Russian culture. These used to be underground, prison songs, full of gangster slang, tales of Siberian labor camps and missing your mother. Now every taxi driver and grocery plays them. “Vladimirsky Tsentral” is a wedding classic. Tipsy brides across the country in cream-puff wedding dresses and high, thin heels slow-dance with their drunker grooms: “The thaw is thinning underneath the bars of my cell / but the Spring of my life has passed so fast.” At the Chinese restaurant Miami Stas sang along too, but he seemed too meek, too obliging to be a gangster.

Every band is a foreign country, with its peculiar customs and dialects, slang and standards. But every band is also (when it works) a small business, a romance, an employer/employee dynamic, a hierarchy, a creative collaboration, and something between a family—siblings or cousins, sometimes literally—and a gang. The rules governing those relationships and hierarchies are usually unspoken, unique to each collection of personalities, and have to be developed and negotiated from the ground up in each situation; often by young people whose priorities are driven more by idealism than by the practicality and the best practices of human resources management (“Pop music is not only cultural work,” wrote cultural theorist Andrew Beck, “it is, apparently, very badly organized cultural work”).1

person. According to nineteenth-century explanations, “We owe the word ‘Dago’ to the Spaniard, whose language furnished this slang name for the men of the Mediterranean countries who come to the United States” or for “dark-colored Europeans.

In a game, there is a main character raised within American culture: he speaks in slang, lives for sex and pleasure, feels "successful" if the opposite sex chases after him, shows off by driving cars and motorcycles, obtains respect if he buys a yacht, worships money and wealth, has numerous tattoos and ornaments, spends his nights in clubs and casinos, feels "powerful" when he holds a gun, makes racist jokes, swears in every sentence, thinks and acts like he is at the center of the universe, and so on. Even if this game is produced in the United States, due to the fact that the whole world has now been made interconnected and interdependent, it easily spreads and influences other unconscious peoples. A child in Jakarta, Stockholm, or Prague begins to use the exact same sayings and do the exact same actions born of Brooklyn streets, Californian frat parties, and Los Angeles gambling centers. The result is that even the culture of a completely different country on the other side of the world ends up becoming American; the narrator in the game becomes the very thing children dream of, teenagers chase after, and adults turn into reality.