Yahoo Autos What’s Your Favorite Curse for Incompetent Drivers?
From the September 2018 issue
In the face of careless driving, whatever happened to indifferent cursing? You know, cursing without the shopworn F-bomb? When a truck backed into the grille of my mom’s Cadillac, she said, “Well, isn’t he fresh?” At the time, I believed it was her only curse apart from “Jesus, Johnny,” which she uttered so often I thought I had dual first names. Mind you, at the time, I also thought that Labor Day-all those picnics, you know?-was meant to celebrate women about to give birth.
My father was a navy vet, so he surely possessed piquant profanity. Yet during his road rages, the worst he ever shouted was “Cowboy!” and, once or twice when his entire nervous system immolated, “Jackass.” I tried to explain to him that those words were not by themselves likely to alter the villain’s behavior.
My Canadian friend Brian Hickey once drove to the Watkins Glen Can-Am race with a pal named Keith. They were in a Riley sedan, which, incredibly, we thought was suave at the time. Keith began chugging Gallo during Friday’s practice, and, in his personal race to lap himself, continued right through Sunday’s main event. At which point he was reduced to three words in any known language: “Up your ass.” So it was perhaps predictable that, on the drive home, when the customs agent asked, “Citizen of what country?” Keith lurched to a facsimile of sentience and shouted, “Up your ass.”
David Sedaris, in Esquire, one of our sister publications, surveyed foreign profanity uttered by folks cut off in traffic. In Copenhagen, they shout, “Why don’t you run around in my ass?” It’s an odd request that would seemingly make the accuser as uncomfortable as the accusee.
In Markham, Ontario, where I lived for seven years, I once was driving behind a man who was ditched in traffic on the Don Valley Parkway. He shouted, “Why don’t you pay my mortgage?” Again, more amusing than blasphemous. Maybe he was a banker. In my experience, Canadians usually shout, “You whore,” pronounced with two syllables, as in HOO-er.
“You’re so short, you have to lie down to comb your hair” was former managing editor Steve Spence’s favorite. He pinned it on me at the wheel of a Tesla Roadster once. It stuck with me because it’s illogical, yet your gut grasps the insult immediately.
In the Netherlands, Sedaris found that diseases worked as curses. “Cholera sufferer,” was popular, also “cancer slut.” But when he asked if “diabetes [slut]” would work, the locals were appalled. The disease had to be terminal.
In the face of traffic thugs, the Austrians sometimes shout, “Why don’t you find a spot on my ass that you would like to lick and lick it?” Again, how much censure is heaped upon the louts here? Plus, it takes forever to shout, so if the evildoer is moving quickly, I wonder if he’ll hear much more than “Why don’t you find a spot,” and it’s possible that’s precisely what he’s trying to do at the moment. It would sound like encouragement.
At a new-car debut outside Honolulu, I heard a local shout, “Sit on your gearshift till Easter.” In Wasilla at the restart of the Iditarod, almost across the street from Sarah Palin’s house, I heard, “Your mother sucks meatballs.” That was shouted by my friend and dog musher Bill Cotter, who was right then driving our long-term Mercedes-Benz ML430. Brits trapped in desperate traffic sometimes shout, “Christ on a bendy bus” and “You’re as dense as Fat Pat’s arteries.”
According to Sedaris, the Bulgarians are partial to “May you build a house from your kidney stones.” If you’ve ever passed a stone, you know what aptness is here achieved.
One of the Romanians’ favorites-and you may want to skip ahead for a moment, because this trends toward the unappetizing-goes: “I dragged my balls across your mother’s memorial cake, from cherry to cherry, and to each of the candles.” Quite a road map of humiliation, I’d say, but not without its counterpart in America. To wit: Former C/Ders Don Sherman and David Gluckman were comparing a torsion-beam VW Beetle against a Turbo with IRS. They stopped to take notes. A man who disagreed with their spirited driving rolled up in a Chevy Avalanche, got out, pulled down his trousers, and rubbed his groinal bundle along Gluckman’s door. “That’s my nuts on your car,” he said. Then he spit on Sherman’s Beetle. Neither of our guys looked at him. Not a glance. Just kept taking notes.
Sherman, in fact, was legendary for indifference in the face of hostility. He once drove a four-wheel-drive car up a hill to demonstrate its prowess for cameraman Aaron Kiley, and the owner of the land that Sherman was right then furrowing came out to have a word. Sherman lowered his window and listened in silence as the landowner deployed the F-word as subject, verb, and direct object. Then Sherman turned to Kiley and said, “How about some lunch?”
Sherman was right. After 50 years of driving, I can report that the cruelest curse is no curse. Disappointing, isn’t it?
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