I wish I could crawl back …

Whn I was seven I spoke pretty fluent Serbo-Croat, and could read it reasonably well. We used to have a beautiful communist encyclopaedia called Svjet Oko Naš though I don’t know what happened to it after my parents moved house. But a vigorous course of character building at prep school drove out of me every scrap of knowledge except for one fairly obscene phrase meaning “you are a fat arse” which a diplomat’s child shouldn’t really have known at all. Now a glorious article linked from languagehat suggests that obscenity is the beating heart of the Serbo-croat language. The headline on this post won’t make sense till you have read to the end, but there are many rewards before then. I particularly liked the ethnological distinction between Serbia and Montenegro: you know you have crossed the border when you stop fucking mothers and start on the fathers.