Back in the day I spent 3 years in the Australian Army Reserves. One of the few skills I’ve retained over the intervening 20-odd years is the ability to use swear words like punctuation. As awesome as this might sound, in normal company it’s a bit of a handicap. As a parent, you need to be aware of listening ears, as your words tend to get repeated, often in the most inconvenient situations.
To make sure I don’t get messages home from school about my kid’s potty mouth, I’ve taken to swearing in other languages. As such, I’ve made good use of my high school french lessons, the swear words taught to us by the guy whose dad was born in Germany and my brief attempt at learning to speak Irish Gaelic. Just the other week, I learnt my first Russian swear word (the good old F bomb), thanks to a children’s TV Show.
Now, to be fair, I didn’t stumble across a show that taught foreign swear words, and this lesson has been a number of years in the making. It starts several years back, when I would often end up watching kids TV with my child. One of the shows on frequently was called Lazytown, and was apparently made to encourage kids to get active. Fast forward a year or two, and I stumble across this epic metal cover of a song apparently from the show by the Melodicka Brothers:
Pretty catchy, but ultimately not being a fan of the show I forgot about it. Fast forward another year or two, and for some reason YouTube decides to recommend the original song to me. Seeing that causes a few neurons to fire, and I remember the metal cover. I do a search for metal covers, and find this amazing version:
About 37 seconds in a line of spoken dialog is replaced by a single word in Russian: “Blyat”. Wondering exactly what was being said I typed it into Google Translate. Turns out, it’s how you drop the F bomb in Russian. So, that’s the tale of how I learnt to swear in Russian from a kid’s TV show.
I like messing with stuff and seeing what I can make it do. Computers, electronics, photography are my main hobbies, but I also enjoy bike riding, gel blasting and music.