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An Anatomy of Chinese
Offensive Words
A Lexical and Semantic Analysis

Adrian Tien · Lorna Carson · Ning Jiang

An Anatomy of Chinese Offensive Words: A
Lexical and Semantic Analysis
Adrian Tien • Lorna Carson • Ning Jiang

An Anatomy of
Chinese Offensive
Words
A Lexical and Semantic Analysis
Adrian Tien (Deceased)

Lorna Carson
School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland

Ning Jiang
Trinity Centre for Asian Studies
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-63474-2    ISBN 978-3-030-63475-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63475-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
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Cover illustration: Marina Mazitova / Alamy Stock Vector

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to Adrian’s memory and to his mother,
Mrs Feng Tien.
 Foreword

This book began life as an individual project undertaken by Professor

Adrian Tien. After living in Australia and Singapore, Adrian moved to
Ireland in 2015 to take up a new post at Trinity College Dublin, where
he was recruited to direct the growing Chinese Studies programme in the
university. Within three years of his arrival, Adrian tragically passed away
following a short illness. Aware of the progress of this book project, we—
Adrian’s colleague Professor Lorna Carson, and his former PhD student
and research assistant Dr Ning Jiang—undertook to complete the manu-
script as a way of honouring Adrian’s memory, our friendship and his
academic legacy. The vision for this book belongs to Adrian, and any
errors or shortcomings which follow remain the responsibility of his
co-authors.
As a linguist who focused on aspects of Chinese linguistics, Adrian
specialized in cognitive linguistics and semantics with a particular focus
on the identification and analyses of cultural ‘keywords’ in Chinese. He
was passionate about the study of language and culture, cross-cultural
communication, language acquisition, studies on Chinese-English/
English-Chinese translation and Chinese sociolinguistics. This book
brings together all of these interests in a wide-ranging, comprehensive
and lively account of taboo language in Chinese. The irony that Adrian
was never heard to utter a single ‘unspeakable word’ (to use our colleague

vii
viii Foreword

Professor David Singleton’s mots justes) was never lost on his contempo-
raries. Adrian’s life and research career were cut off in their prime. His loss
to the international academic community, to his students and friends, is
simply too great to be described here. He was a beloved scholar, friend
and son, and we were honoured to know him. We hope that this book
will convey his passion and expertise as well as help to deepen knowledge
of Chinese language and culture in the English-­speaking world.
 Preface

I first met Adrian Tien in August 1990. I was teaching a first-year course
on Cross-Cultural Communication in the Department of Linguistics at
the Australian National University, and it was the first lecture of this
course. That year, it was held in a large lecture room in the John Dedman
Building. I had already started addressing the students when the door
opened and a very young and anxious-looking student came in. It was
Adrian. He was 17 years old. He approached me after the lecture, very
serious and very intense, and immediately started telling me about his
great dilemma: should he study linguistics or music? He loved both, he
said: ‘what to do?’ I encouraged him to stay with both linguistics and
music, and he did: throughout his all-too-brief life, he pursued both lin-
guistics (in particular, semantics, i.e., the study of meaning) and music,
and had great achievements in both fields.
In 1997, in Australia he was bestowed the title QTA (Queen’s Trust
Achiever Award) by the Governor General of Australia as a Young
Australian Achiever, an award which honoured his achievements in
both fields.
He went on to complete his Ph.D. in 2005 at the University of New
England, Australia, supervised by Professor Cliff Goddard. This led to his
first book Lexical Semantics of Children’s Mandarin Chinese during the
First Four Years (2011). In it, he looked deeply into the relationships
between words and thought in the developing mind of a young child.
ix
x Preface

This was followed, in 2015, by his masterpiece The Semantics of Chinese

Music: Analysing Selected Chinese Musical Concepts, completed while he
was at the National University of Singapore.
A mere decade later, the website of the Cobh Cathedral wrote: ‘Adrian
Tien, gifted musician and professor of Asian Studies of Trinity College
Dublin, departed this life last Monday aged 45 following a short illness.
Adrian presented a memorable guest recital on our cathedral carillon in
August 2016.’
Adrian’s two careers, as a linguist and as a professional classical musi-
cian, were not kept apart but nourished one another. In my tribute on the
cover of The Semantics of Chinese Music, I wrote: ‘This is an eye-opening
account of Chinese ways of thinking and talking about music, and by
implication, possible ways of thinking and talking about music in gen-
eral. Musicology and linguistics meet in this book in a way they have
never done before.’
Adrian’s work was based in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage meth-
odology (NSM). Inspired by Leibniz’s idea that there is an innate ‘alpha-
bet of human thoughts’ shared by all people on earth, the NSM movement
has sought to identify that shared ‘alphabet’ and to find its matching
embodiments in as many languages as possible including, of course,
Chinese. A second, closely related goal has been to understand and
explain complex cultural meanings with the help of that shared set of
human concepts which ‘show up’ in all languages as simple words trans-
parent in their meaning. THINK, FEEL and HEAR are among their
number. Importantly, so are also concepts like GOOD, BAD and TRUE.
These twin ideas—the existence of an identifiable set of shared human
concepts and its value for human understanding, across languages and
cultures—first captivated Adrian’s imagination and won his heart when
he was still a young undergraduate; they provided a direction for his work
throughout his life.
Let me finish with another personal recollection. In 2015, Adrian
came to Canberra, partly to discuss his work with his semanticist friends.
He and I met several times for lunch in the Pancake Parlour to discuss the
details of his semantic analysis of musical concepts. These discussions
were a great joy. Next to semantics, we talked about God, especially at
 Preface xi

our last meeting. I discovered that Adrian had deep and serious faith and
was clear in his mind about the purpose and meaning of his life.
He was serene and mature. He loved his life in Dublin. He also loved
travelling to linguistic conferences in different countries and on different
continents, and presenting his NSM-based work there. He felt that he
was receiving very good responses from the international audiences: he
felt that people were interested, often fascinated, that his work was valued.
At those working lunches in 2015, Adrian also spoke to me about his
mother Feng, who stayed close to him all his life and provided an emo-
tional anchor for him. She lived with him in Dublin. Seeing him in 2015
as a confident researcher and university teacher, full of life, I understood
how his mother Feng was a constant in his life and how grateful he was
to her and for her.
Those lunches at Pancake Parlour were the last times I saw Adrian.
When the tragic news of his death came three years later, the memory of
those meetings was a consolation to me. Adrian truly loved his work, the
big picture and the smallest details—he was passionate about both. This
love of both the big ideas and the smallest details (seen in the context of
the big picture) illuminates his third book (An Anatomy of Chinese
Offensive Words: A Lexical and Semantic Analysis), which he wasn’t given
time to finish but which his colleagues in Dublin have now so lovingly
completed and prepared for publication.
The NSM community, scattered around the world but united in spirit
and in the love of the ideas and goals that we share, pays tribute to Adrian
Tien, with love.

Canberra, Australia
Anna Wierzbicka
 Contents

1 What Is All the Fuss About?  1

2 An Anatomy of the Chinese Offensive Lexicon 17

3 Collecting and Categorizing Offensive Words in Chinese 53

4 Four Representative Offensive Items from the Chinese

Lexicon 67

5 Offensive Words in Chinese Dialects 99

6 Offensive Words in Chinese Cyberspace145

7 Offensive Language and First Language Acquisition of

Chinese157

8 Offensive Language and Sociocultural Homogeneity in

Singapore: An Ethnolinguistic Perspective177

xiii
xiv Contents

9 So, What Was All the Fuss About?209


Appendix A: Inventory of Natural Semantic Metalanguage
(NSM) Semantic Primes213

Appendix B: List of Chinese Offensive Words215

Index239
 About the Authors

Lorna Carson is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at Trinity

College Dublin, where she is Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech
and Communication Sciences, Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian
Studies and Fellow of the College. She holds a B.A. (Mod.), M.Phil. and
Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, and an M.A. from the College of
Europe, Bruges. Her research addresses issues located at the interface
between individual and societal multilingualism. Her books include
Language and Identity in Europe: The Multilingual City and its Citizens,
with Chung Kam Kwok and Caroline Smyth (2020); The Multilingual
City: Vitality, Conflict and Change, with Lid King (2016); Language
Learner Autonomy: Policy, Curriculum, Classroom, with Breffni O’Rourke
(2010) and Multilingualism in Europe: A Case Study (2005).
Ning Jiang is Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Trinity
Centre for Asian Studies, Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests
include psycholinguistics (second language acquisition and semantics),
Chinese Studies in culture (Chinese diaspora and cultural issues in new
media) and aspects of Chinese–English translation studies. She holds an
M.Ed. and Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, a B.A. in Teaching
Chinese as a Foreign Language from Shanghai University, and a B.Sc.
(Applied Psychology) from East China Normal University.

xv
xvi About the Authors

Adrian Tien was Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the Trinity

College Dublin. A linguist whose research focused on Chinese linguis-
tics, his work ranged across the areas of semantics and cognitive linguis-
tics, language and culture, cross-cultural communication, language
acquisition, translation studies and Chinese sociolinguistics. Along with
numerous journal articles and book chapters, he was the author of The
Semantics of Chinese Music: Analysing Selected Chinese Musical Concepts
(2015) and Lexical Semantics of Children’s Mandarin Chinese during the
First Four Years (2011).
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Singapore culture and its constituent subcultures 182

Fig. 8.2 Singapore’s subcultures, subsumed under an overarching
Singapore culture, have shared cultural values 183

xvii
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Summary and comparison of main sociocultural

mechanisms behind the meanings of jiàn1, búyào liǎn,
wángbā/wángbā dàn and cào/gàn (Source: Authors’ creation) 94
Table 7.1 Offensive lexicon used by children (2–11 years old) (Wu
2010, p. 37) 162
Table 8.1 Representative list of common offensive words and phrases
in Singapore (Source: Author’s creation) 184
Table 8.2 Representative offensive Hokkien words and phrases in
Singapore (Source: Authors’ creation) 185
Table 8.3 Summary of cultural underpinnings of offensive words and
phrases in Singapore (Source: Author’s creation) 202

xix
 1
What Is All the Fuss About?

While most of our emotional outbursts may stem from a physiological or

reflexive response to certain situations, things or people, we are making
conscious linguistic choices when we use words to offend. If we can, we
may exercise restraint even before making that choice, in which case we
may opt not to say anything. When we do choose to say something to
make our negative emotions known, we may say it blatantly with offen-
sive words or use discreetly or strategically selected words. If the choice is
to express our negative emotions verbally in no uncertain terms, then we
may draw from part of our language’s lexicon which contains offensive
words. The choices that we make do not stop there, as we will still need
to decide whether any offensive word which we use is to be targeted at a
certain someone or something—likely the target of abuse whom we pur-
posely want to say something ‘bad’ to—or whether it merely serves as a
kind of targetless interjection through which we may vent our feelings.
How do we know that using offensive words is all about making lin-
guistic choices? For most of us, offensive words do not just slip out of our
mouths. Whether or not we proclaim ourselves to be users of offensive
words, chances are most if not all of us will know what offensive words to
use (as opposed to other offensive words which may appear similar in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

A. Tien et al., An Anatomy of Chinese Offensive Words: A Lexical and Semantic Analysis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63475-9_1
2 A. Tien et al.

form or meaning) and where these words should go in an utterance or

conversation so that these words not only function grammatically but
also make sense semantically. Furthermore, there usually needs to be an
awareness of when it is appropriate or acceptable to use offensive words
(functional context), when and/or where it is appropriate or acceptable to
use offensive words (sociolinguistic environment), and to whom and/or
how offensive words can be used (pragmatic functions). The linguistic
choices in question here are not so much about what one is or is not
allowed to say as it is about when it makes sense to use offensive words—
or certain offensive words—in order for these words to convey the impact
we intend. As Mohr (2013, 250) puts it, ‘when you swear, you do not just
use any old bad word—you choose the one calculated to do the most
insult, to relieve the most stress’. Using offensive words injudiciously runs
the risk that the very purpose of these words is defeated.
Studies such as The Lost Art of Profanity (Johnson 1948) and Màrén de
Yìshù 罵人的藝術 ‘The Fine Art of Reviling’ in Chinese (Liang 1999)
are not about how offensive words should be avoided in language use, but
instead, they are about observing, capturing and describing such words in
language use when they serve their linguistic purpose and carry their full
offensive power. Native speakers of a language may have intuitions about
making linguistic choices in using offensive words. For example, Lee
(2005, 158) postulated that native speakers have an ‘internalized knowl-
edge of […] swear words’, and Syed (2014, 3) surmised that ‘the majority
of native English speakers know exactly which words’ are represented by
categories of offensive words in English, such as the f-word, the n-word,
the c-word and the b-word (see also Napoli and Hoeksema 2009, 613;
Walcott 2007, 15–16 for example, whose studies lent weight to native
speakers’ intuitions regarding use of offensive words). These intuitions
mean that native speakers usually have no trouble using offensive words
appropriately, that is to their maximal effect. It is, however, easy to take
such intuitions for granted, for it usually takes a fair amount of effort for
non-native speakers of a language before they are able to come to terms
with the kind of linguistic choices that they could/should make when
they find themselves in situations where using offensive words in that
language might be appropriate.
 1 What Is All the Fuss About? 3

Caldwell-Harris (2014, 1), for instance, pointed out that there are cer-
tain ‘emotionality differences between a native and a foreign language’, in
the sense that bilingual speakers feel a difference when they are swearing
in a non-native language as opposed to their native language. Dewaele’s
(2013) research showed that offensive words, among other emotion-­
laden words, carry less ‘emotional weight’ for the non-native speakers
than they do for native speakers. Dewaele (2016, 112) further discovered
that non-native speakers ‘overestimate the offensiveness of most words,
with the exception of the most offensive one in the list’, and compared to
native speakers, they are ‘less sure about the exact meaning’ of offensive
words and seem to show a different distributional pattern of offensive
words (see also Dewaele 2010). It appears that mastery of offensive words
in the non-native language is linked with speakers’ proficiency of that
language—or at least part of that proficiency—and factors such as prior
experience of immersion in the non-native language (e.g. experience liv-
ing in that linguistic environment) and having been socialized into the
various uses of offensive words, including the kinds of ‘inhibitions that
usually constrain usage’ of these words (Wajnryb 2004, 164) play a vital
role in this mastery. On account of this, Mercury (1995) called for offen-
sive words to be properly taught to non-native speakers as part of the
language teaching curriculum, including what, when, where, to whom,
why and how these words may be used as they are by native speakers.
There are many labels for what we understand to be offensive language:
‘swear words’, ‘dirty words’, ‘bad words’, ‘foul language’, ‘rude language’,
‘taboo language’, ‘obscene words’ or ‘obscenity’, ‘profane words’ or ‘pro-
fanity’, ‘vulgar words’ or ‘vulgarity’, ‘curse words’ or ‘cursing’, ‘blasphemy’,
‘expletives’, ‘insults and slurs’, ‘slang’, ‘scatology’, even ‘colourful meta-
phors’ and ‘sexual innuendoes’. There must be a reason why offensive
words exist at all as part of a language’s lexicon, whether or not these
words are accessed by every language user (noting that while one person
may declare never having used offensive words, another may confess to
using offensive words on the odd occasion or on a regular basis). It appears
that, one way or the other, humans cannot do without offensive words,
and there is plenty of evidence to suggest this. In situations of language
contact, for example, offensive words are usually among some of the first
vocabulary items in a language (the source language) to creep into the
4 A. Tien et al.

lexicon of another language (the host language), often being either

directly adopted (borrowed) as loanwords by the latter or literally trans-
lated into the latter. The friend of one of our acquaintances who was in a
German-speaking country and who had very limited German vocabulary
once felt it necessary to offend with the rather innovative bilingual utter-
ance, You Scheiße! ‘you shit!’, when she felt rudely treated by a shop assis-
tant. While this is obviously not a proper German utterance involving
the word Scheiße! ‘shit’—and to a German speaker, it may even sound
comical—it did seem to carry across our friend’s emotions rather well and
to let these emotions be known to the target of her outburst.
According to Wajnryb (2004), offensive words are among those ‘lin-
guistic expressions which convey cultural attitudes or personal feelings’
(197), which do not ‘lend [themselves] elegantly, or even effectively, to
translation’ (177) and which ‘can lose their abusive edge, and even seem
comic’ (176), when translated into another language. Therefore, in order
for offensive words to retain their impact along with the cultural attitudes
that these words encapsulate in the source language, speakers of the host
language tend to hold on to these words’ original form and their undi-
luted offensive meanings as much as possible, in ways such as keeping
these words as loanwords or, at least, their literally translated versions in
the host language. The offensive loanword kan—‘cunt’ in the Papua New
Guinean language, Tok Pisin, used in contexts such as kan yu ‘you
cunt!’—is reputed to have entered this language through Australian
English when Australian troops were based in the country during the
Second World War. The word’s lexical form closely resembles the original
English word and, as in English, its meaning is highly derogatory. The
offensive phrasal word seven morning eight morning cry father cry mother
in indigenous Singapore English (also known as ‘Singlish’) clearly
originated from qī zǎo bā zǎo lit. ‘seven morning eight morning’ in
Chinese Mandarin and kaopeh kaobu lit. ‘cry father cry mother’ in
Chinese Hokkien which, as a whole, refers to someone who apparently
likes to complain incessantly and unreasonably first thing in the morning.
This phrasal word in Singlish is a fascinating example of how innovative
a language can be—in this case Singlish, which is essentially a creole
based on English, with significant lexical influences from Chinese
Hokkien and Mandarin—when it comes to borrowing offensive words
 1 What Is All the Fuss About? 5

arising from language contact situations (see Chap. 8 for an in-depth

analysis of kaopeh kaobu).
Offensive words in a source language can be readily taken up by speak-
ers of a host language because, as mentioned previously in studies such as
those by Caldwell-Harris (2014) and Dewaele (2010, 2013, 2016) as
well as in Wajnryb (2004), offensive words feel different to these speakers
if these are not in their native language. This implies that host language
speakers have additional lexical options to make their emotions known
verbally through these loaned offensive words, without necessarily feeling
culturally or personally attached to these words. Studies conducted, for
instance, by Beers Fägersten (2007, 2012, 2017a) have found that in
Sweden there is an increasing trend for English swear words to be used,
particularly in the Swedish media. According to Beers Fägersten (2017a,
4), using English swear words this way instead of Swedish presents ‘the
opportunity to swear with impunity that is both the motivation and the
reward for the usage’.
Perhaps as an aside, the (in)famous curse ‘may you live in interesting
times’ apparently attributed with a Chinese origin and ‘borrowed’ by
many notable figures in their speeches, such as Robert F. Kennedy, is now
popularly believed to be apocryphal since apparently no equivalent of the
curse has been found in Chinese. Nevertheless, this curse did emerge
from a language contact situation when British diplomats were living in
China in the late nineteenth century, so there must be an answer some-
where in the source language context as to where this expression may
have come from. Our take on this offensive phrase might have stemmed
from one of the culturally sensitive themes, to do with cultural views on
life and death (Tien 2017). Dying naturally and in relative comfort,
without any suffering (to die a good death), is seen by Chinese to be as
just as important and desirable as it is to live in relative comfort without
worldly troubles. On the basis of this, an offensive Chinese may curse
someone bú dé hǎo sı ̌ 不得好死 lit. ‘to suffer an uncomfortable death’
just as they may wish for someone rìzi bù hǎo guò 日子不好過 lit. ‘to
lead an uncomfortable life’. Ràng nı ̌ rì zi bù hǎo guò 讓你日子不好過
‘may you live in discomfort’ seems to be the most likely and the closest
possible origin to ‘may you live in interesting times’ in English, particu-
larly if we note that the adjective interesting in English often has a
6 A. Tien et al.

sarcastic connotation. If this notion is correct, then the curse represents a

good example which demonstrates that offensive words (in this case, a
phrasal word) do not lend themselves elegantly, or even effectively, to
translation.
This book is not in any way intended to glorify offensive words and to
advocate their use; rather, it seeks to demonstrate why offensive words
should not be taken for granted, for these words exist for different reasons
and there also are explanations as to why we cannot seem to live without
them. Casting personal opinions, judgements and emotions aside and
going beyond furrowed eyebrows, disgusted looks, shocked reactions or
even the frivolous giggle, chances are that even native speakers who are
supposed to be equipped with intuitions about using offensive words
may be hard-pressed to explain what a certain offensive word really means
(in particular, how the meaning of an offensive word differs from the
meaning of another offensive word, which may feel similar in meaning
but which is semantically different, nevertheless). This book is about tap-
ping into the meanings of offensive words, engaging in semantically rig-
orous analytical methods in making sense of these words.
Even though a body of literature does exist which represents serious
and scholarly studies of offensive words, it is fair to say that few of them
have focused on what offensive words mean: their semantic composition
and why/how their meanings offend. In fact, many studies of offensive
words have undertaken to document and describe offensive words, from
the following standpoints among others: lexicographical (e.g. Mohr
2013; Sheidlower 2009; Wajnryb 2004); historical and cultural (e.g.
Mohr 2013; McEnery 2006; Johnson 1948); sociolinguistic, anthropo-
linguistic or psycholinguistic (e.g. Beers Fägersten 2012, 2017b; Jay
1992, 2000, 2009a, 2009b; Pinker 2007; Allan and Burridge 2006;
McEnery 2006; Jay and Janschewitz 2008); cross-cultural and typologi-
cal (e.g. Ljung 2011; Wajnryb 2004); translational (e.g. Ghassempur
2009; Lim 2013) and philosophical (e.g. Neu 2008). There is a small but
important selection of scholarly outputs that do focus on analysing offen-
sive words metalinguistically and semantically (e.g. Tien 2015; Goddard
2015; Wierzbicka 2002; Stollznow 2002, 2004). However, these are
more the exception in the body of literature which we will visit in some
of the discussions later.
 1 What Is All the Fuss About? 7

Wajnryb’s (2004) often quoted book, Language Most Foul, is a lexico-

graphical and cultural account of offensive words. Having grown up in a
non-native English-speaking household, Wajnryb used English offensive
words as a reference (or departing) point most of the time as she explored
many cross-cultural issues which are integral to an understanding of
offensive words in human languages—for instance, the issue of translat-
ing offensive words. Wajnryb points out the many difficulties and limita-
tions, if not impossibilities, involved in translating these words from one
language into another (e.g. 92–93, 176–177, 190, 197). Such cross-­
cultural issues arise because, according to her (181), ‘the way a people
swear is a mirror to their culture’. Wajnryb describes the ‘culture-­
specificity of swearing’ (132), which accounts for the ‘difficulty in com-
paring swearing across cultures’ (138). In order to at least make an
attempt at understanding offensive words in a language, it is, therefore,
important to detail any cultural, grammatical or structural ‘modes of
describing differences [in swearing across cultures]’ (138), along with any
relevant contextual information which is ‘pivotal to the equation’ (99).
In her book, Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Mohr (2013, 14)
begins with the premise that ‘swearing is […] a uniquely well-suited lens
through which to look at history. People swear about what they care
about, and they did so in the past as well. A history of swearing offers a
map of some of the most central topics in people’s emotional lives over
the centuries.’ With this in mind, her book documents ‘what had mat-
tered most to English-speakers over hundreds of years, and how this is
revealed by swearing’. Mohr’s account of offensive words in English is
essentially historical, lexicographical and cultural, in particular explain-
ing how the verb to swear has arrived at its current meanings of ‘taking an
oath’ and ‘causing verbal offence’. One piece of insight Mohr offered on
the semantics of offensive words is that ‘swear words have been thought
to possess a deeper, more intimate connection to the things they repre-
sent than other words’ (ibid., 6). In other words, the meaning of a swear
word has a literal dimension which represents a candid semantic connec-
tion between it and its referent in the real world. The F-Word by Sheidlower
(2009) is a lexicographical and etymological account of the word fuck in
English, which lists alphabetically vocabulary items that incorporate the
word in its various morphological forms, for example absofuckinglutely,
8 A. Tien et al.

batfuck, celebrity fucker. In Who’s Swearing Now? The Social Aspects of

Conversational Swearing, Beers Fägersten (2012, 20) describes ‘sociolin-
guistic analyses of spontaneous speech, questionnaires, and interviews
from members of one American English speech community’. Her impe-
tus was ‘the use of swear words as a complex social practice fulfilling
intricate pragmatic functions’.
Jay’s (1992) widely quoted volume on the subject of offensive words,
Cursing in America, is supposed to be, primarily, a socio-pragmatic study
of ‘how people actually curse in real-world situations’, ‘consider[ing] how
cursing is used in particular contexts and identify[ing] how the use of
certain words affects both the speaker and the listener within the setting
of a speech situation’. It examined usage and/or frequency of offensive
words in the United States in the domains of early language development
and society. While data were collected through experiments, interviews
or surveys, the main aim of Jay’s investigation remained on the contexts
and uses of offensive words in American society (see also Jay 1992, 2000,
2009a, 2009b, as well as Jay and Janschewitz 2008). Forbidden Words:
Taboo and the Censoring of Language by Allan and Burridge (2006) is an
anthropolinguistic account of ‘taboo and the way in which people censor
the language that they speak and write’ (1). According to the authors (2),
‘humans react to the world around them by imposing taboos on behav-
iour, causing them to censor their language in order to talk about and
around those taboos’. Their definition of the word taboo is ‘a proscription
of behaviour for a specific community of one or more persons, at a speci-
fiable time, in specifiable contexts’ (11). This is a relevant point because,
presumably, some of the offensive words cause offence to ‘one or more
persons’ as their use or their meaning contravenes, one way or the other,
the ‘proscription of behaviour’ of the given community. Putting this
another way, an offensive word may be seen as ignorance for a commu-
nity’s taboo because its use in a certain linguistic context runs against the
community’s ‘proscribed behaviour’ or its meaning touches on a theme
which is considered to be in the sensitive realm of ‘proscribed behaviour’.
What do translation studies have to say about offensive words? One
interesting study is Ghassempur’s (2009) unpublished thesis, titled, ‘Tha’
Sounds Like Me Arse!’: A Comparison of the Translation of Expletives in Two
German Translations of Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments. According to the
 1 What Is All the Fuss About? 9

author, this was a ‘quantitative as well as qualitative investigation into the

translation of swear words in the dialogue of two German versions of
Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987)’, and it ‘systematically
examine[d] swearing in a large corpus and dr[e]w conclusions about how
two translators deal with the different functions of swearing in an Irish-­
English work of literature’ (ibid., viii). Another piece of scholarly work
was by Lim (2013) in her dissertation entitled, A Pragmatic Study of
Chinese Subtitles of Offensive Words in American Film ‘The Hangover’. In
this dissertation, Lim examined Chinese translation of American English
offensive words featured in the movie and studied pragmatic, semantic
and cultural differences between the offensive words in their original
source language English and in their translated renderings in the host
language Chinese. It found huge, often incommensurable, differences
between each English offensive word and its supposed translational
equivalent in Chinese. Studies of this kind shed new light on offensive
words and show that cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences remain
between the offensive lexicons of languages, irrespective of how similar
they may seem.
Compared with other accounts of offensive words, Neu’s (2008) Sticks
and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults offers a somewhat different kind of
insight. As the title of the book suggests, his take is on linguistic insults.
According to Neu, ‘while what counts as an insult varies widely from
culture to culture, desire for respect (and the related desire to avoid being
disrespected or diss’d) is universal’ (vii). Some of the characteristics of
linguistic insults Neu observes that are relevant to the current discussion
are the following:

• ‘To insult is to assert or assume dominance, either intentionally claiming

superiority or unintentionally revealing lack of regard. To be insulted is to
suffer a shock, a disruption of one’s sense of self and one’s place in the world.
To accept an insult is to submit, in certain worlds to be dishonoured.’
• ‘Absence of an intention to insult does not defuse the word’, necessarily
(129). Neu (131) continues: ‘some words may be presumed guilty [of causing
offence] until the case for the non-offensiveness of their use [or mention] has
been made.’ In many cases, the law determines what words constitute ‘insult-
ing and forbidden’ in all circumstances.
10 A. Tien et al.

• However, ‘context can negate a demeaning intention’ (129). For example, the
intimate use of the ‘n-word’ between African Americans and other youths to
denote friendship.
• ‘One needs not know the meanings of the words in order for the intention to
insult to be successfully conveyed. Indeed, the speaker can transform mean-
ings, provided that the manner of expression and the context make the emo-
tional point clear’ (117). Neu’s example is a three-year-old uttering You lamp!
You towel! You plate! as words of insult.
• ‘One’s words can mean more than one consciously intends’ (130). For exam-
ple, innuendoes or insinuations (though it may be argued that the speaker
still has a ‘conscious intention’ in uttering words of these kinds, which the
addressee can find offensive).

Based on these characteristics, offensive words insult because their

meaning and use show a lack of respect (for the addressee, etc.).
Furthermore, some offensive and insulting words are, by their very
semantic nature, ‘demeaning’ though, through pragmatic strategies
including contexts, the meanings of such words may at least temporarily
lose their insulting edge. On the flipside of the coin, a word whose mean-
ing is not normally insulting in nature may be used to offend, again
through pragmatic strategies and other linguistic or extra-linguistic
manipulations.
Neu (2008) holds interesting views on labels—or, more correctly, cat-
egories—of offensive words. According to him (123), there is ‘obscene
language, that is conventionally offensive and shocking words, [which]
may be divided into profanities (including blasphemies, vain swearing
and curses) and [there are] vulgarities (including scatological and sexual
“dirty” words as well as racial and ethnic slurs, animal and political epi-
thets, and other subclasses of invective)’. He continues (127): ‘other
terms of abuse, such as comparisons of persons with animals or with
despised objects, need not violate verbal taboos in order to be abusive. It
is the disreputable analogies that make certain similes and metaphors and
imputations intolerable.’
Last but not least, Neu (126) explains that when offence is caused, this
may have involved a ‘violation of convention in the use of taboo words’.
For instance, offensive words—such as blasphemous insults—‘involved
 1 What Is All the Fuss About? 11

the use of forbidden words and so the breaking of […] taboos]’ (e.g.
naming taboos) (124). It appears that ‘taboo’ or ‘forbidden’ words encap-
sulate in them (or in their meanings) certain societal or cultural attitudes
that have been conventionalized over time and violating such conven-
tions, or conventionalized attitudes, leads to a breaking of established
social or cultural taboos. Neu (125) elaborates further: ‘attitudes [driving
at taboos] are socially shaped, sometimes perhaps for good reasons, some-
times for no reason at all […] Society seeks to constrain both the activi-
ties and the language used for describing [things/themes considered
tabooed].’ However, Neu points out that ‘we have our boundaries, both
personal and conventional, and verbal crossings of those boundaries can
carry great emotional force’. In other words, sometimes offence is caused
because the meaning of a word contravenes the shared conventional and
societal attitudes; other times offence is caused by this word because it
steps over the line in terms of what an individual considers acceptable or
tolerable.
Anthropologist Ashley Montagu penned the well-known work The
Anatomy of Swearing (Montagu 1967), examining the history and usage
of offensive language in English. Here, our proffered anatomy of contem-
porary offensive language in Chinese examines such words not only in
Chinese Mandarin but also in some Chinese dialects, notably Hokkien
and Cantonese, as well as some non-standard varieties of these.
Importantly, representative offensive words have been subjected to rigor-
ous semantic, linguistic and cultural analysis, using the Natural Semantic
Metalanguage approach. Our findings contribute to the understanding
of Chinese language and culture in some new and innovative ways. Some
of the main claims which will be explored in the following chapters can
be summarized as follows:

• Using offensive words is more than just about accessing a socially sensitive or
tabooed part of our languages on impulse. It is about the kind of linguistic
choices that we make and not only are we conscious of the linguistic choices
that we are making, but as proficient speakers, we are aware of any social
taboo which is behind the offensive word.
• If offensive words are socially tabooed because they pose a kind of challenge
to certain social norms or cultural values—to mention the ‘unmention-
12 A. Tien et al.

ables’—then it is worthwhile to ask what these unmentionables are and to

identify what social norms or cultural values are being challenged.
• Offensive words are pungent enough to offend because the unmentionables
that these words depict are characteristically based on those social norms or
cultural values that really matter to those who live, think and behave in the
culture. Therefore, at least some offensive words are likely to be cultural key
words as well, since they encapsulate significant social norms or cultural values.

This book will proceed with a chapter which contextualizes the study
of the offensive lexicon in Chinese (Chap. 2). It will tackle some key
representative offensive words that are known to all Chinese and to all
those who have proficiency in Chinese (Chap. 3). Tapping into some
representative offensive words will reveal some of those immensely sig-
nificant social norms or cultural values that really matter to those who
live, think and behave in Chinese culture (Chap. 4). We will then survey
offensive words in selected Chinese dialects and their varieties (Chap. 5),
because offensive words can illustrate linguistic variation across different
dialects or varieties of the same language; the same offensive meaning
expressed by similar yet different lexical forms or conversely, the same
lexical form expressing similar yet different offensive meanings. A study
on offensive words in contemporary Chinese cyberspace (Chap. 6) probes
a few high-frequency terms found in Chinese online communication that
reflect highly dynamic and flexible language use. Then, an investigation
into the emergence of offensive words and offensive language generally in
the context of early acquisition of Chinese (Chap. 7) traces when, why
and how young children come to deploy offensive words during the early
years of life. Last but not least, the examination of Chinese offensive lexi-
con takes us to Singapore, where offensive words may serve as a way of
reinstating sociocultural homogeneity (Chap. 8). Here, we demonstrate
that people use offensive words not just to offend others but, in a curious
way, to bond with others.
A few notes on what is to follow. We use an extensive range of real-life
examples, drawn from online discussion boards, social media, newspa-
pers, corpora and other sources. Given the shifting nature of online
sources and a desire to focus on the linguistic content rather than the
individual author, we do not link each and every example to the specific
 1 What Is All the Fuss About? 13

source post, especially for those drawn from discussion boards. Rather we
provide a list of the principal resources that we mined in the appendix to
this book. Most of our examples are drawn from written sources, although
the chapter on child language use is drawn from an oral corpus. Finally,
to close this introductory chapter and to kick-start our ensuing discus-
sions, we quote Tien (2015, 164), who reminds us that offensive words
‘represent a fascinating and compelling source of enquiry, richly packed
with cultural information waiting to be discovered’. With this promise,
the chapters of this book will take readers through a discovery of Chinese
offensive words as rich as the cultural information that lies behind them.

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 2
An Anatomy of the Chinese Offensive
Lexicon

2.1 Introduction
While offensive words are found in the lexicons of the world’s languages
and despite some of their similarities, offensive words are not cross-­
linguistically transferrable or translatable. Nevertheless, it is possible to
sketch out some general linguistic properties and characteristics of offen-
sive words across languages. As a matter of fact, offensive words them-
selves constitute only the lexical representation of offensive language, in
terms of words or lexical items (e.g. whore, bitch in English). Offensive
language may also be represented morphologically or syllabically, in
affixes that offend (e.g. in Japanese, when offensive morphemes are
attached to the verb fuzakeru ‘to joke around’, modifying it, forming
offensive predicates such as fuzakeru na ‘don’t bullshit me!’ and fuzakeru
na yo ‘don’t you fucking bullshit me!’) as well as syntactically or phrasally,
and in phrases that offend.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 17

A. Tien et al., An Anatomy of Chinese Offensive Words: A Lexical and Semantic Analysis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63475-9_2
18 A. Tien et al.

2.2 The Offensive Lexicon

Focusing specifically on offensive words (as opposed to offensive language
in general), these items are reported to form a special lexical category in
many, if not all, languages, dictated by somewhat strict formal and
semantic rules (e.g. Ljung 2011, 4; Napoli and Hoeksema 2009). In his
monograph, Swearing: A cross-cultural linguistic study, Ljung (2011)
examines cross-cultural swearing by profiling offensive words. According
to this analysis, (71), there are four main parameters for what qualifies as
a ‘swear’ word, namely:

1. Swearing is the use of utterances containing taboo words.

2. The taboo words are used with non-literal meaning.
3. Many utterances that constitute swearing are subject to severe lexical, phrasal
and syntactic constraints, which suggest that most swearing qualifies as for-
mulaic language.
4. Swearing is emotive language: its main function is to reflect, or seem to
reflect, the speaker’s feelings and attitudes.

Ljung (2011) goes on to provide a typological account of offensive

words, taking as his point of departure Pinker’s assertion (25) that ‘people
swear in at least five different ways’ (Pinker 2007, 350):

1. Descriptive swearing: Let’s fuck!

2. Idiomatic swearing: It’s fucked up.
3. Abusive swearing: Fuck you, motherfucker!
4. Emphatic swearing: It’s fucking amazing.
5. Cathartic swearing: Fuck!

Ljung argues that Pinker’s offensive ‘categories’ are probably ‘too few
and too broad’, and adds McEnery’s (2006, 32) typology of swearing,
which comprises 15 categories as follows:

1. Predicative negative adjective: The film is shit

2. Adverbial booster: Fucking marvellous, fucking awful
3. Cursing expletive: Fuck you/me/him/it
4. Destinational usage: Fuck off! He fucked off
 2 An Anatomy of the Chinese Offensive Lexicon 19

5. Emphatic adverb/adjective: He fucking did it

6. Figurative extension of literal meaning: To fuck about, in the fucking car
7. General expletive: (Oh) Fuck!
8. Idiomatic set phrase: Fuck all, give a fuck
9. Literal usage denoting taboo referent: We fucked
10. Imagery based on literal meaning: Kick the shit out of
11. Premodifying intensifying negative adjective: The fucking idiot
12. Pronominal form with undefined referent: Got shit to do
13. Personal insult referring to defined entity: You fuck/That fuck
14. Reclaimed usage—no negative intent: N****rs/Nz
15. Religious oath used for emphasis: By God!

In addition to the above typological categorizations of offensive words,

Ljung (2011, 29–44) details the various functions and themes of swear-
ing: ‘functions are the uses that the swearing constructions are put to by
the swearers, while the themes are the different taboo areas that these
constructions draw on’ (29). He conceived three functional categories of
swearing (30–35):

1. The stand-alones: for example, expletive interjections such as shit!

2. The slot fillers, for example, adverbial adjectival intensifier, for example,
bloody in bloody hell and absobloodylutely.
3. Replacive swearing.

The third function, replacive swearing, refers to ‘taboo words that may
replace an almost infinite number of ordinary non-taboo nouns and verbs
which are given new literal meanings which are interpreted in terms of
the linguistic and situational settings in which they are used’ (35). For
instance, the word shit in Jimmy is a piece of shit (162) is an offensive
noun (or more precisely, a noun in an offensive nominal phrase, includ-
ing its preceding noun classifier, a piece of) whose literal meaning no lon-
ger has anything to do with the original referent which is the bodily
excretion, even though it remains demeaning.
On the swearing themes across languages, Ljung (35–44) notes that
these have to do with the religious/supernatural, scatological, sex organs,
sexual activities, mother/family, ancestors, animals, death, disease and
prostitution. It should be reiterated here that the general linguistic
20 A. Tien et al.

properties and characteristics of offensive words outlined in the above

typological profile of offensive words have captured only what offensive
lexicons in world’s languages are believed to have in common. The jury is
still out as to what the exhaustive linguistic properties and characteristics
of offensive words are in every language.

2.3 Profiling Offensive Words Semantically

Getting down into the semantics of offensive words, it helps to spell out
the basic composition of the meanings of such words in the simplest way
we can. To begin with, offensive words apparently form a special lexical
category—they are ‘words of one kind’, taxonomically speaking. These
words ‘offend’ because people find them ‘offensive’. Goddard (2015, 93)
posited a shared semantic component for the meanings of the offensive
words swear word and curse words (cuss word): ‘many people feel some-
thing bad when they hear words of this kind.’ This seems to be true, for
whatever labels we attribute to offensive words—or to categories of such
words—people consider them offensive as these words cause ‘bad feel-
ings’, one way or the other (noting Beers Fägersten 2012 who, as men-
tioned earlier, presented a plethora of labels for offensive words).
Presumably, offensive words are words that people ‘say’ most typically
when they ‘feel bad’. However, it may also be the case that people pro-
duce these words not because they have any ‘bad feelings’ but because
these words appear expressively appropriate on occasion or because these
words may form a normal part of their vocabulary. When people do have
negative feelings, they may feel this way because they are reacting emo-
tionally to someone or something (cf. Goddard 2015, 193). It should be
observed here that when people feel this way, it is not necessarily the case
that what someone did or what has happened is in itself something unfa-
vourable, undesirable or unpleasant; rather, it may just be that the action
or event happens to set off negative emotions in the speaker. Then, of
course, people may also ‘feel bad’ because they just do, not because of any
external trigger.
When people choose to make their negative emotions known, their
words may be targeted at a certain someone (or, less typically, something),
 2 An Anatomy of the Chinese Offensive Lexicon 21

often with the intention of making that person also feel bad (‘I feel some-
thing very bad towards you’ and ‘because of this, I want to say something
bad to you’) (c.f. Goddard 2015, 202). Or these words may be uttered
merely as a way of venting one’s negative emotions (‘I feel something
bad’), without being directed at anyone (197). Last but not least, people
can make someone else feel bad when they say something about someone
else or something. For example, while the offensive word motherfucker
offends not because of its literal meaning, its non-literal meaning, which
is intensely disrespectful, must have emerged as a result of semantic
extension from reference to the illicit act of having sex with one’s mother.
On the dichotomic contrast between literal and non-literal meanings
of offensive words, the terms ‘connotative’ versus ‘denotative’ often crop
up in the literature (e.g. Mohr 2013, 6; Jay 1992, 10–12). An example is
the word prick, whose literal and denotative meaning refers to the penis
and whose non-literal and connotative meaning is emotionally charged
to offend someone, usually male, as a way of denigrating them. Even so,
it appears feasible to surmise that there is probably some kind of a seman-
tic association between the connotative/non-literal and denotative/literal
meanings of an offensive word. In the case of the example just given, the
offensive sense of the word prick (the connotative meaning) probably
stems from blatantly mentioning the male body part (the denotative
meaning), because the verbal offender is being deliberately insensitive
towards the social custom that the private body part is not usually some-
thing which is openly and uninhibitedly mentioned. If there was not any
semantic association between the connotative/non-literal and denotative/
literal meanings of an offensive word, then one might as well have used
the word penis as an emotional and offensive word, in place of the word
prick (noting that penis is normally an unemotional word used denota-
tively to refer to the anatomical part).

2.4 Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

With the mission of getting inside the meanings of offensive words, we
need a rigorous methodological and analytical tool with which to actually
define, rather than to merely describe, what an offensive word means.
22 A. Tien et al.

This book has adopted the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM)

framework for the purpose. The NSM is, in principle, a reductive
approach to meaning which makes use of 65 or so semantic primes in an
attempt to elucidate, as well as to represent, the meanings of culture-­
laden concepts, such as offensive words; see Goddard and Wierzbicka
(2013) for a full account of the NSM. Appendix A of this book contains
the complete inventory of NSM primes.
The semantic primes are so called because their meanings are so sim-
ple, they cannot be further deconstructed into further semantic compo-
nents. These primes are basic or primitive semantic units. They are
‘natural’ because, instead of artificial and technically complex terms, each
of the primes has a naturally identifiable lexical or formal counterpart
(lexical exponent) in all human languages (or at least as far as empirical
testing has so far supported). For this reason, primes are also known as
‘lexical universals’. Taken as a whole, the primes operate as units of a
metalanguage which form the basis of the discussion and analysis of lin-
guistic meaning.
Semantically complex meanings of words—as are the meanings of
most words, including those of offensive words—can be thought of as
sets of semantic jigsaw puzzles. Each jigsaw puzzle (the meaning of a
word) is made up of puzzle pieces (semantic primes). Just as the puzzle set
is only complete if all puzzle pieces are there, obtaining the complete
picture for the meaning of a word in a semantic analysis requires all con-
stituent primes of the meaning in question. In the same way that the
puzzle pieces are held together in a certain way, semantic primes follow
certain combinatorial patterns in a way that avoids syntactic and language-­
specific complexities. To do so, there are universally attested configura-
tions of primes established in NSM research that dictate how a given
semantic analysis ought to be formulated (see Goddard and Wierzbicka
2013, among others).
In this volume, we will also make use of an important NSM technique,
namely cultural scripts (see Goddard 2009; Goddard and Wierzbicka
2004). The rationale is that a community of people—usually people of a
culture (or of a society)—has its shared assumptions, values, norms, atti-
tudes, beliefs, mentalities or ethos. These characteristics are culturally real
and the meanings behind them are often very complex, even though
 2 An Anatomy of the Chinese Offensive Lexicon 23

there may not be any single words that exist in the language to represent
them. NSM explications of these characteristics, typically introduced by
a semantic component along the lines of ‘many people think as fol-
lows …’, are known as ‘scripts’ as they capture the cultural meanings
behind such shared cultural characteristics, articulating them metalin-
guistically based on primes. Coming to grips with cultural scripts in rela-
tion to the assumptions that underlie the meanings of offensive words—or
categories of offensive words—or the attitudes towards use of these offen-
sive words will be pivotal to tapping into important cultural underpin-
nings of offensive language.
Another interesting NSM notion which is relevant here is the idea of
cultural key words. According to Wierzbicka (1991, 333; 1997, 15–17),
a word may qualify as a key word if it encapsulates vital cultural informa-
tion on the commonly held characteristics of the community of people in
a culture and if it is problematic to translate into other languages.
Sometimes a cultural key word may have a high frequency of occurrence
in the language’s lexicon, and sometimes it may belong to a cluster of
words in the language which elaborate on a significant aspect of the cul-
ture, describing or referring to that aspect (this is the idea of ‘cultural
elaboration’; see Wierzbicka 1997, 10–11). It will become evident from
analyses of offensive words in this book that offensive words are also cul-
tural key words, since they fulfil some or all the criteria as outlined by
Wierzbicka. After all, there is no stipulation that a cultural key word has
to sound ‘good’ (in this sense, an analogy may again be drawn with the
jigsaw puzzle: it is what it is, even if it does not look ‘pretty’).
Some of the past NSM literature demonstrating how it is possible to
get inside the meaning of offensive words include Wierzbicka (1992,
2002), who analyzed the meanings of the offensive b-words in Australian
English (bloody, bastard, bugger and bullshit). In fact, nearly all of the
NSM studies have focused on selected offensive words and offensive lan-
guage generally in Australian English. Hill’s (1992) article investigated
the difference between imprecatory interjectional expressions (‘God
knows’ and ‘goodness knows’) in Australian English. Kidman’s (1993)
unpublished thesis was a study of the ‘semantics of swearing in Australia’,
concentrating on four-letter words. More recently, Stollznow (2002,
2004) analysed terms of abuse in Australian English, including whinger,
24 A. Tien et al.

wowser and wanker. Goddard’s (2015) article is ground-breaking in that

it represents a first attempt at rigorously defining the terms swear word
and curse (or cuss) word using the NSM. He then proceeded to analyse the
semantic and pragmatic meanings of selected words in (primarily)
Australian English, such as shit, fuck and damn. Tien’s (2015b) article,
titled ‘Offensive language and sociocultural homogeneity in Singapore’,
sets itself apart from previous NSM studies of offensive words in that it
explicates offensive words in a language other than English. It considered
sociolinguistic implications of offensive words (notably, the positive
aspects of people in the same language and culture sharing the same
offensive lexicon). This article is incorporated into this book (Chap. 8)
due to its uniqueness and critical relevance to current discussions.
A novel aspect of Goddard’s (2015) study of offensive words which
needs to be singled out for discussion here is that it adopts semantic tem-
plates in structuring NSM explications of the meanings of these words.
Many of the semantic templates are similar yet different because if we
take a word such as fuck, for instance, even though its pragmatic mean-
ings when used are all somewhat different and represented by the tem-
plates differently, there has got to be something constant in the semantic
meaning of fuck (a semantic invariant) so that when people come across
this word, they will have no trouble understanding what it means, what-
ever its pragmatic environment. See for example its use as an exclamation
(fuck!), in question formulas and imperative formulas (what the fuck? and
get the fuck out of here), as a word of direct abuse (fuck you!), as an ‘angry’
word ‘associated with bad feelings towards someone or something’ (you
fucking bastard! and the fucking car won’t start; see Goddard 2015, 205)
and even in a ‘non-angry’ or ‘social/conversational’ context (fucking
brilliant!).
But the main point here is the contribution that semantic templates
make to NSM explications of the meanings of offensive words. As it will
become evident at various points in this book, we will make use of seman-
tic templates in analysing such words when they are used as direct abuse
and (to a lesser extent) when they are used in association with expressing
bad feelings towards someone/something. To be clear, the semantic tem-
plate for the former involves a ‘cognitive trigger’, ‘reaction’, ‘expressive
impulse’ and ‘word utterance’ and ‘metalexical awareness’, and the
 2 An Anatomy of the Chinese Offensive Lexicon 25

semantic template for the latter encompasses ‘attitude’, ‘expressive

impulse’, ‘word utterance’ and ‘metalexical awareness’.
Goddard’s (2015, 196–197) explanation of these sections of the tem-
plates is that the ‘cognitive trigger’ provides for ‘a component based on
semantic prime KNOW and/or THINK, with a complement depicting a
situation’. ‘Reaction’ accommodates ‘a FEEL component, modelling the
speaker’s bad feeling response and its intensity’, for example, ‘bad’ or
‘very bad’. ‘Expressive impulsive’ addresses ‘the urge to say something; in
the case of swear words, something bad’ and, ‘word utterance’ specifies
‘the speaker’s performative utterance of a particular word’. The section
‘Attitude’ in templates of the latter kind contains the following semantic
component: ‘when I say this now, I feel something very bad towards
someone/something’ (205–206). Note, at this point, that the details of
what goes into each section of the template may change, depending on
the semantics of a given offensive word.
To distinguish between the meanings of offensive words when they are
used as direct abuse and when they are used in association with negative
feelings towards someone/something, the section ‘metalexical awareness’
is involved in the semantic template structure of both meanings.
According to Goddard (2015, 189 and 212–213), this section is ‘the
most novel aspect of these explications’. His claim is that this section
models ‘speaker awareness of the particular words being used, and ethno-­
metapragmatic knowledge about the status of these words in the com-
munity of discourse’. He further elaborates (198) that ‘the metalexical
awareness section can be thought of as “attached” to the word itself: a
kind of lexical annotation depicting the speaker’s ethno-metapragmatic
awareness of the status of the word’. As an example, the ‘metalexical
awareness’ section attached to the word fuck when it is used as a directly
abusive word (fuck you!) contains the following semantic component,
according to Goddard (202):

many people can feel something very bad when they hear this word
many people think like this: it is very bad if someone says this word

In fact, exactly the same semantic component also goes in the met-
alexical awareness section in the semantic template of the NSM
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