Euroswearing 2012, second semi-final
So, boastfully, I can still claim a perfect score. Five games, all correctly predicted by my (completely scientific) swearing algorithm. Now to the sixth . . .

Germany vs Italy

As before, I first take into account the two team’s previous. In particular, what are the two nations’ favourite swear. So . . .

Germany: Scheisse! Italy: Strongo! Both shit. Both two syllable words starting with the same sibilant, both with a feminine (unstressed) ending. Neither that fantastic compared with, say, fuck! Nothing to separate them there then.

How to figure it? I put some thought into this and eventually decided on comparing the two languages’ swearing capabilities via  genital analogies from the natural world.

Germany first. Its women have a prune (Pflaume). Italy? Its women have figs (la figa). Young German boys have snails (die Schnecke). Italian men have artichokes (carciofi). Well, I make that one each. Figs trump prunes and snails make more sense than artichokes.

So to the final round. Flicking through my book, Filthy English, I found a head-to-head comparison of slang words for the clitoris  in Anthropophyteia, a 19th century German publication which collected European 'Idiotica' - popular words and phrases. It was quoted by psychoanalyst Leo Kanner in A Philological Note on Sex Organ Nomenclature, a paper written at the depths of WW2. It’s an investigation of the comparative rareness of slang words for the clitoris.

The relevant findings by Kanner? Two from each of tonight’s competing nations. Italian allegria (gaiety) and the southern Italian ribrenzulo (seat of shivers). Germany was represented by a pair of regional examples, the Prussian Schiepe (little strip) and the Westphalian Kujon (bad man). There is a little more, though . . .

He also found one word for the clitoris common right across German-speaking central Europe: der Jud, the Jew. Which, given what was going on in that part of the world at that time, is something of a surprise, not to mention shock. In Viennese German, there was even the phrase, 'Am Jud'n spiel'n'. Like all early psychoanalysts, like Freud himself, when faced with uncomfortably direct sexual expression, Kanner retreated into fanciful Latin, translating the phrase as 'fellare vel irrumare clitorem'. In simple English its meaning is clear: 'play with the Jew'. Or rather, play with the male Jew. If this clitoris were female, it would be die Jude. But it's not. There, I guess, is the derivation. The reference is to the glans of an uncircumcized penis. Which suggests that at least some central-Europea German-speaking women must have known the visual reality of their masturbation metaphor.

So, it’s got to be Italy, hasn’t. Simply a better class of clitoral metaphor.

PS My footballing brain would go for Germany. So this really is a test of my algorithm.

Next The final prediction. I’ll post this over the weekend, possibly on Saturday.

A room in Bloomsbury

So there we were in a private room in a Bloomsbury hotel. Which sounds more Virginia Woolf than it was. Far more. Maybe a bit Lytton Strachey, though. It was just down the road that his little brother James translated Freud into English. I doubt James Strachey took local hotel rooms for the afternoon, though.

It was a drinks-affair to mark the end of the course’s seminars. It was in a room off the main bar, with a large TV screen showing a black and white Audrey Hepburn movie, with the sound turned off. Breakfast At Tiffany’s suggested someone. But it wasn’t. I knew that. The Eiffel Tower kept cropping up and there’s no Eiffel Tower in Breakfast At Tiffany’s — nor two eggs over easy with wholewheat toast either, of course. Noel Coward kept appearing, too. I felt I’d seen it but couldn’t remember it.

Nearly everyone on the course turned up. In fact, the only absence I noted was the person who talked the most in seminars.

There were chairs round the edge of the room. We sat in them, a little awkwardly, the way you do when you’re not used to socialising. The people who knew each other talked to each other. The faculty members poured the white wine (not bad) and handed round the Thai-ish snacks (pretty good).

‘How generous,’ said a student to the administrator. ‘You paid for it,’ said the administrator who, despite not being English, has a finely tuned sense of English dead-drop irony. The student was clearly taken aback. ‘Your fees cover everything,’ I explained. I’m not sure I was understood.

After an hour so, the drink ran out and most people moved on to a pub — the cheapest pub in the area. We stood on a pavement in the early evening sun and drank cheap beer and cider from plastic cups.

They told me about how their year was so much less social than the previous one. I told them that I’d felt a real outsider for most of the year. Because I’d done more than three-quarters of the course (and exams) in my first year, I attended hardly any lectures. So it took me a really long time to get a hold on all their names. Also, there was often barely a spare seat and I’d find myself squeezed out to the margin.

The social thing seems to have been really important to them.

One of them told me he’d just been working, as an actor, on a Ridley Scott’s new version of Robin Hood, filming in Surrey somewhere, I seem to remember. He played a French assassin. ‘Talk them to death with Lacanian concepts, did you?’ I said.

Then someone mentioned Princess Marie Bonaparte, the woman who rescued Freud from Vienna. Catherine Deneuve played her in the 2004 biopic. Brancusi sculpted her as a phallus. A cousin of Prince Phillip’s, she sloped off from the Coronation with Francois Mitterrand, then a French cabinet minister. To psychoanalyse him, she said.

I added the odd fact that she’d had her clitoris surgically moved. Twice, in fact, if I remembered right.

‘Why?’ asked one of my fellow cheap beer drinkers.

She thought it might improve her sex life, I think.

‘Where did she have it moved to?’

I said: ‘I don’t know.’ Someone else said: ‘To her forehead?’

I should have replied but didn’t: ‘Walthamstow, actually.’

PS The film finally ended. It was Paris When It Sizzles — which has a film within a film called The Girl Who Stole The Eiffel Tower.

Next up I have seen the future and it’s smelly