Potentiation of a Spanish insult
by Mario E. Teruggi
[Published: Maledicta, vol. 5 (1981) page 77]

"Hijo de puta", "son of a whore", is undoubtedly the more common personal insult in Spanish, and it is found in the classical literature of Spain as the contracted form "bideputa". Of course, the formula is found in other languages, either straight or edulcorated, like "son of a bitch", "son of a gun" and similar expressions in English.

In "hijo de puta" the emphasis is placed on the person whose mother is accused of having been a harlot, but, very often, the interest is displaced towards the mother herself, and the insulting formula is changed to "la puta que te parió", "the whore that bore you". The English translation is very weak because there is no satisfactory equivalent of "parir", since "to bear, to give birth, to foal" or "to calve" all lack the force and feeling of rudeness of the Spanish verb.

"La puta que te parió", at least in Argentina, is now more frequently heard than "hijo de puta". With the minor change of the dative pronoun "te" for the neutral "lo" ("la puta que lo parió"), it has an everyday use to discharge one's wrath, annoyance or ill humor against all sorts of inanimate objects, minor accidents or difficulties that stand in our way. The sentence is often reduced to a mere "¡Que lo parió!" which is also employed to denote surprise or astonishment.

The frequent use of "la puta que lo parió" has, pebble-like, reduced much of its aggressiveness by the rounding off of its cutting edges and corners. That is the reason why, when we are really mad at somebody, we resort to two insults in order to give full vent to our indignation, saving in the same breath "¡Hijo de puta y la puta que te parió!". It is to be observed that the equivalent of "motherfucker" and "motherfucking" are not used in Spanish, although they would be perfectly understood and can be heard in Mexico ("¡Chinga tu madre!", etc.). (Reference: Larry M. Grimes - "El tabú lingüístico: su naturaleza y función en el español popular de México" - Cuernavaca. CIDOC. Cuaderno N° 64, 1975)

Luckily for the people who want or need to utter their verbal aggressions with superlative strength, the Spanish language offers the possibility of raising the insult to a higher power, so to speak . In Argentina the maximum reinforcement is found in the utterance "¡La reputísima madre que te recontra mil parió!" which requires some explaining.

The prefix "re-", as in English and many other languages, is used in Spanish to imply repetition or duplication. "Putísima" is the superlative of "puta", here used as an adjective to be translated as "most whorish". "La reputísima madre" then means "twice the (your) most whorish mother". As to "recontra", it means "twice against" ("you" is implied) and is commonly used as a reply to an insult by simply muttering "que te recontra", connoting "the same to you but twice". In the insult we are here considering, as a final reinforcement, the noun "mil", "one thousand", is added to "recontra".

Thus, the whole sentence can be translated: "The twice most whorish mother that bore you again and again one thousand times!".

In a mathematical approximation, if W stands for "whorish" and B for "bore", the insult formula would be:

Insult = 2 * W^2 * mother ... B * (1+1) * 1000

Actually, (1+1) * 1000 is not understood in the sense that the mother gave birth 2000 times to the same child but as a definite reinforcement of the mother whorishness.

In a nutshell: the mother that bore you was twice 2000 times squared a whore.

One wonders if other tongues have this possibility of numerically increasing common insults. Of course, one could simply say, "Your mother was a billion times a whore", but it is the multiplying, doubling and squaring that, in a long crescendo, fills the utterer's mouth with a resounding an cathartic sonority.