{ "item_title" : "How To Insult Somebody In Every Language", "item_author" : [" Pearse Tolan "], "item_description" : "You have smiled politely long enough. Across many languages and five continents, human beings have developed systems for expressing contempt of extraordinary ingenuity: the Finn who insults with silence, the Egyptian who reaches for the watermelon, the Swede whose warmth is so complete and so consistent that you won't notice the verdict until you are three weeks and five hundred miles away. How to Insult Somebody in Every Language is a tour of the world's sharpest tongues, a guide to what people say when diplomacy has run its course, what cultural values the insult reveals, and why calling someone a donkey means something entirely different in Persian than it does in Dutch. It is part linguistic anthropology, part cultural history, and part practical reference for anyone who has ever sat in traffic in Istanbul, Cairo, or Chennai and wished they had the right word. Here you will find the full taxonomy of the Dutch disease-curse, the eight registered uses of the Greek malaka, the Persian insult as a small poem, the specific Israeli anxiety about being a frier, the Norwegian outdoor standard and those who fail it, and the Thirukkural's two-thousand-year-old framework for naming a fool. Each chapter examines not merely the words but the world behind them: what a culture prizes, what it cannot forgive, and what, when all social packaging has been removed, it reaches for. A work of genuine scholarship and barely suppressed delight. Indispensable.- A Reader Who Has Been to All These Countries Finally, a book that explains why my Finnish host's smile made me feel so uneasy for the rest of my life.- A Traveller, Still Processing Do not read this on public transport. You will laugh at things that require explanation.- Someone Who Has Made This Mistake Book One in this series covers the first fifteen languages: British English, American English, French, German, Castilian Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Italian, European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Ukranian, Dutch, Danish and Swedish.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers4.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/823/786/9798237864779_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "39.99", "online_price" : "39.99", "our_price" : "39.99", "club_price" : "39.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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