Young school boy shouts profanity at Trump rally

[L_Mariachi]

@Enkita

Russian zamok, castle and zamok, lock

German uses the same word for castle and lock too! It always made a sort of intuitive sense to me, as the two things serve similar purposes on different scales. It also works as a synecdoche.

[Enkita]

@AnthonyC

Well, it would be very difficult to have true homophones in Italian

I am sure you are right (I don’t know enough Italian to register) but why exactly?

[renke]

a nearly perfect one-to-one mapping of written language and speech, so the most you could get is a word with two different meanings

[Enkita]

@renke

a nearly perfect one-to-one mapping of written language and speech, so the most you could get is a word with two different meanings

Ah. I now see the point the OP is making. And of course in Italian word stress is accented in print, unlike Russian or English. Thank you.

[AnthonyC]

I’m not sure I am right. I just can’t think of how 2 words could be
pronounced the same and spelled differently when b Italian spelling is
completely phonetic.

[renke]

The Italian Wikipedia has an example, but if this is the best they could find homophones are incredibly rare…

Un caso emblematico – in italiano neutro (o standard) – è anche /alˈlɛtto/ [alˈlɛtːto], cui possono corrispondere ben sei grafie diverse: <a letto>, <al letto>, <all'etto>, <alletto>, <ha l'etto> (in pronuncia tradizionale, con cogeminazione di ha /a/ davanti all'articolo determinativo l[o]), <ha letto>.

[Enkita]

@zathras

I’m no parent myself, but as a scout master (in Austria) I’ve been in charge of more than one ten-year-old in public. And for most values of XYZ that would have merited a mild talking-to. Had I spanked any of them, I’d probably be in prison right now. And had I learned of parents spanking their kids for using bad words in public, I would have called Child Protective Services. But that’s a different decade and a different country from your childhood (you are over 20, right?).

And to avoid misunderstandings: I don’t want to accuse your parents of doing anything wrong, I just want to underline the message that America really is more sensitive to children using bad words than many other cultures.

Well, Russia recently passed a law making the four most common anatomical swear words illegal. Bitch (suka) is still legal for the moment, but “whore” will get you fined.*
In the case of the US, though, I think it may be polarisation. The country with the biggest pornography industry and the biggest obsession with “free speech” may have the largest number of adults reacting to it.
I used to stay fairly frequently in an hotel in Bavaria, and on several occasions I took non-German-speaking British engineers with me. I had to tell them that the “pornographic” magazines on the hotel bookshelf were just ordinary German magazines, because front page nudity wasn’t anything out of the ordinary (this was the 1990s, things may have changed.) Had I taken some of the people from our operations in Kentucky or N Carolina, I think their Baptist heads would have exploded.

*Edit - Umberto Eco says that to understand what a culture spends a lot of time doing you need to see what is forbidden by law. The application in the case of swearing in Russia is obvious. As a student, I remember someone who, having spent a year working in factories in both the US and the USSR, was able to say that the Soviet and US blue collar classes had evolved more or less the same swearing phrases by convergent evolution.