https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat_(Russian_profanity)
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-08/russian-curses-are-inventive-widely-used-and-banned
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Russian curses are inventive, widely-used — and banned [/h]
The thing non-Russian speakers don’t really understand about Russian curses, or mat, is that we’re not just talking about your favorite one-syllable curse words here — mat is an entire language unto itself.
Take the word “desk.” Not much you can do with it in English, right? But in Russian, I can “desk” something. I can get super desky and deskify it. I can be the deskiest! Because unlike English, Russian has hundreds of suffixes and prefixes.
“As a result,” University of Chicago linguist Yar Gorbachov tells me, “you could have a whole dictionary filled up with mat words.”
There are actual
dictionaries filled with mat words. Paradoxically, the hot-rodded words formed from the four obscene roots (I’ll let you guess what
those are…) often turn out not to mean anything obscene at all.
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Welcome to the wonderful world of Mat.
In the Soviet USSR, the commissars tried to get all people of the USSR to learn Russian. Many people in the Stans purposefully tried not to learn Russian. Except Mat. Everybody speaks Mat.
Linguists rank Russian as one of the top languages for obscene language. Top language is English. Spanish also ranks high, and modern Greek. At the bottom of major languages when it comes to cussing are Japanese and German.
Japanese often do their cursing in English.