Parma and language

I love words, I think they are wonderful. Also learning other languages and I always think the more you know the better you can communicate with more people. I coined the term "PARMA" which is a mix of parking karma. This term is used when my friends and I are looking for that hard to find parking spot. Usually a friend has parma when the parking spot is found very quickly in a normally more time consuming manner in that area. IE Finding a spot in Back Bay, Chinatown or Harvard Square on a busy weekday or weekend are perfect examples.
Knowing other languages, I find more times than not, English does not accurately represent what I want to say. I find that either Mandarin and Cantonese is more descriptive and more apt in explaining what I want to convey.

Just this past Sunday, I had an interesting conversation about the usage of profanity. Personally, I do not swear alot. Blame it on my folks and their influence on not allowing us to swear growing up. Granted my dad has a colorful vocabulary but I never copied him. Or so I thought anyways. One time when I was seven, I used a term and I got a good earful from my mom. The gist was a "good girl" does not have a potty mouth. Even in high school, it was an event when I actually said "damn" for the first time. This titillated all my friends with feigned horror and shock.

To this day, I do not use the "F bomb" much. I use friggin more (not often) and avoid the "f" bomb. But I find swears in other languages to be more meaningful. One of my HK friends mentioned growing up in elementary school there is this rhyme of 50 characters that kids would sing that would cover all the swear words. Even with many friends who want to learn phrases , the first ones they want are swear words. Not "please", "hello," and "thank you".

In Cantonese, I can tell you our swear words wound the person and the families. I notice that one swear loosely translated means "may all your family die". This is bad as family is very important to the Chinese people! In other languages, one's mom is involved too in the swear phrase. Why is that? The giver of life being maligned, I guess that is a big insult, and swears are not supposed to be flowery words either.

But I must admit, all my close friends are not potty mouths. I feel there is a time and place to swear. If you are very frustrated and stressed out swearing releases the stress and tension. But I find if you use it often, for me it loses its allure or specialness.
Just my two cents for what it is worth.