Dr Christine Fair, a prominent American political scientist and Georgetown University professor specialising in South Asian security and counter-terrorism, recently called President Donald Trump a ch***ya—several times—during an interview with Pakistani-origin British journalist Moeed Pirzada, a man who himself is no stranger to the word on air.
It is not the first time Trump has been bestowed with this title. Last year, X users were calling him a “certified ch***ya” several times (which, in the Indian context would translate pretty much to ‘ek number ka ch***ya’ or ch***ya #1 ) but as far as I know, it is the first time somebody (especially somebody so erudite) has actually mouthed the word—non-ironically as the Gen Z say—on camera.
When South Asian users tried decoding the word for global audiences last year, many described it as translating to ‘c**ty idiot’, which isn’t too far off the mark. In modern colloquial Hindi, ch***ya does mean foolish, stupid, or incompetent, but with a stronger, more offensive connotation due to its vulgar roots (it derives from a rude word for female genitalia).
Illustration: Deni Lal
Could ch***ya be on the verge of going mainstream? It wouldn’t be the first profanity with foreign roots to make the leap to respectability—and even to the Oxford English Dictionary. One is tempted to imagine language to be a sort of London Season in Regency England, with OED playing the part of the patronesses of Almack’s, and ch***ya as an audacious upstart, hoping to make the cut, emboldened by the success of equally vulgar predecessors like putz, schmuck, pendejo and others (putz and schmuck both derive from Yiddish and originally meant penis, but have now been prettified to mean moron or sucker. Pendejo is Spanish and literally translates to pubic hair, but is now also used as a synonym for stupid).
And it’s not like other desi words haven’t made the cut. There’s chaddi for one—a homely word for underwear—which was popularised through the phrase ‘kiss my chaddis’ in the show Goodness Gracious Me, to the point where ‘keep it in your chaddis’ and chaddi-buddies’ are common parlance today. There’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a superhit musical and film, based on a book by Ian Fleming; a title inspired by a bawdy British army ditty, where soldiers had to get a ‘chitty’ or permission slip to leave their base and visit brothels to ‘bang’ the ladies there.
So ch***ya can dare to hope. Delhiites (and Punjabis on both sides of the border, probably) would claim it to be an extremely useful and practically wholesome word—and hey, all cusswords sound cute/softer/exotic in the mouths of people who are not native speakers. But there’s no getting away from the fact that if used in professional, academic, or public settings, it is never short of crass and disrespectful.
But then crass and disrespectful are words more and more people are associating with Trump, who himself recently used ‘f**k’ while talking to the press about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The usage was rendered even more offensive because it was an English word in the mouth of a native English speaker, so there was zero scope for either exoticity or cuteness.
There’s a reason why the casual use of mother-tongue expletives is frowned upon in formal, high-stakes settings. It creates an informal, wham-bam-care-a-damn shoot-from-the-hip slackness where anything goes, like say planning to bomb countries on an unsecured Signal chat, randomly hiking tariffs, and issuing executive orders with the rat-a-tat-tat-tat-ness of machine gunfire.
Pausing long enough to use good languages helps us keep our fingers off triggers. Countries and people in crucial jobs everywhere need to resist the temptation to swear.
editor@theweek.in