Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Part I: Othering and abjection as deep practice -- 1. "I will kill you today" - Reading "bad language" and swearing through Otherness, mimesis, abjection and camp -- 2. Ten issues facing taboo word scholars -- 3. "Damn your eyes!" (Not really): Imperative imprecatives, and curses as commands -- 4. "Oh, bald father!": Kinship and swearing among Datooga of Tanzania -- 5. Aesthetics of the obscure: Swearing as horrible play -- 6. "I sh.t in your mouth": Areal invectives in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa) -- Part II: Cultural mobility as context of transgression -- 7. The linguistics of Jamaican swearing: Forms, background and adaptations -- 8. 'Don't say it in public': Contestations and negotiations in northern Nigerian Muslim cyberspace -- 9. Mock Chinese in Kinshasa: On Lingala speakers' offensive language use and verbal hostility -- 10. The name of the wild man: Colonial arbiru in East Timor -- Part III: Disruptive and trashy performance -- 11. Found and lost paradise: Bad language at a beach in Diani, Kenya -- 12. The sexy banana - artifacts of gendered language in tourism -- 13. English- and Spanish-speaking teenagers' use of rude vocatives -- 14. "He shall not be buried in the West" - Cursing in Ancient Egypt -- Afterword -- Index