[Guest post by Bob Ramsey]
I’ve been thinking about this subject for more than thirty years. It started for me back in the late 70s. Back then, Herb Passin, who was at the time a professor of sociology at Columbia (remember him?), published a series of articles on language subjects in a popular Japanese magazine, and then in 1980 published them in an English-language volume called Japanese and the Japanese: Language and Culture Change (Kinseido). One of those essays of his was called “Comparative Profanity”, where he made the claim that “Japanese curse words and expletives are basically different in nature from the other major languages of the world.” The essay was more than a little over the top, of course, but it certainly gave me some food for thought.
So then I went back and took a more careful look at what my mentor Sam Martin had said about such topics in his masterful A Reference Grammar of Japanese, and I saw once again how vastly better Martin’s volume is than any other reference grammar I know of—for any language. On pp. 453-454 Martin gives extensive examples of how the functionality of such vocabulary can be found in a series of verbal suffixes Japanese grammarians call ‘auxiliary verbs’ (助動詞). These colorful suffixes include forms such as –sarasu, -ya[a]garu, -ku[s]saru, the earthiest of which is apparently the latter, which is derived from the verb kusaru ‘putrefies’. Among Martin’s many examples are these: Nani o si-yagaru ‘What the hell are you doing?’; Ore-tati o uragiri-yagatte … ‘The bastards stabbing us in the back…’; Nani site –kusaru ‘What the shit are you doing?’. What’s especially good about Martin’s volume is that his examples were not made up by imaginative linguists but almost all come from real world sources (popular magazines, transcripts, etc.). (And Martin put this unmatched reference work together in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, before the advent of computerized data bases! Everything was written down on thousands and thousands of 3×5 cards!)
I might add that, though that little volume of Passin’s has since fallen into obscurity, it had a lot of observations about Japanese that, despite a few embarrassingly salacious remarks about sex and his mistress (among other things, he talks about how you say ‘fuck’ in Japanese), deserve some serious attention. Passin died back in 2003, but I well remember how astonishingly good his command of Japanese in all its styles was. One example I recall was that one year, when he had some Japanese workmen doing some renovation work on his apartment, he bossed them around in Japanese the way a Japanese boss would. To say the least, that’s not something many Western scholars of Japanese sociology could manage!
The two halves of the bowl snap together to make a giant D20 (saving throw up, of course), and then snap apart to form a pair of dishwasher/ microwave-safe serving bowls -- 
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