13 March 2009

if the streets were paved with pricks, your mother would walk on her ass.

slate's explainer column has a tasty little summary of the global history of motherfucker and its various mom-poking variants. to wit:

The nastiest Greek curses, for example, are gamo ti mana sou, gamo tin Panagia sou, and gamo to Khristo sou—"fuck your mother," "fuck your madonna," and "fuck your Christ," respectively. According to G. Legman's classic Rationale of the Dirty Joke, "Go fuck your mother" (Idy v kibini matri) is the "Russian ultimate-insult." Other cultures that venerate motherhood use variations of the phrase as well. Mexicans like to hurl the invective chinga tu madre at their rivals. During the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese exclamation du me—literally, "fuck mother"—morphed into the popular American military slang term doo-mommie.




04 March 2009

sleep well. study well.

i haven't been linking to work blog posts so much because (well, because i've started to feel it's pretty f'ing gratuitous to begin with, but also because) a lot of the ones i write for it are more serious/boring. but this one's about sleeping, which i know for a fact a lot of my friends like to do. also, there's a picture of a sleeping cat [let it lie, too?]. sleep and study.