Dirty Words: A Foreigner's Guide to American English Profanity

This is not your typical guide to English! Stand back frightened administrators and shy teachers—Dirty Words will guide foreign language students through the dangerous territory of everyday English profanity. In Dirty Words you get all the English vocabulary that you can’t learn from textbooks—the rude and the crude, the American language of anger and frustration. It’s all explained here, clearly and with examples and humor. The book is divided into eight chapters covering such topics as anatomy, expletives, insults, and humor. The Accidental English chapter is devoted to words with multiple meanings; often these are common, otherwise harmless words that have additional layers of profane or obscene meaning. ESL students will benefit greatly from an understanding of these words. Another chapter defines various ethnic, racial, and homosexual slurs, as well as words associated with the bathroom. The glossary contains most of the terms discussed in the book. The final chapter contains exercises that test the comprehension of the dirty words and phrases explained in the text; the answers to these exercises can be found in an appendix. Dirty jokes are scattered throughout the text. Some readers may find them funny, some may not, but they provide a vehicle for instruction that is not only engaging for the student but contextually appropriate, as humor is one of the most frequent sources and uses of profanity. Many of these jokes depend on the comprehension of multiple meanings of a word. Each joke is accompanied by an explanation and a list of relevant vocabulary words.