Allow me to suggest that the avoidance you mention is either restricted to Mandarin or to the Mandarin taught in schools. While doing fieldwork in Taiwan, my wife and I were startled to hear mothers in our neighborhood cursing their children by shouting at them in Hokkien ka* li nia* (Mandarin, gan ni niang; literally “Fuck your mother”).

John

So, a couple of questions…

Does the use of deictics to stand for unmentionables in Chinese–i.e. 那个, or “that”, which can stand for a lot of “dirty” things, and is sometimes the only word that polite people ever use to refer to such things–operate as vulgarity?

Which are more prevalent–language where the dirtist words are the words for sacred things, or words so basic as to be unavoidable, which have come to be obviously and shockingly “dirty” in certain contexts? or languages like English, where vulgarity is pretty much always identified with words (“fuck” and “shit”) that have no clean usage (the fact that “ass” has one has much to do with the popularity of the word “donkey”)? There’s one obvious difference between such languages…the censors have it much harder in Quebec and China!

My own impression, after leaving my small town and meeting a few non-Quebecois francophones, is that these words don’t have the same impact for francophones in the rest of Canada, even those along the border of Quebec. But that’s purely anecdotal.