You're not serious.

Think about the last time you really wanted to insult someone.  Not just a minor slap to the face, but really offend someone to their core.  What did you say?  My generation is so comfortable with foul words that the terms asshole, douchebag, dick, bastard, and whore barely merit an eye blink.  Young Americans curse so much that our insults have lost almost all sense of gravity and weight.  The term bitch now means so little, that I often use it as a term of endearment among young women my age.  I could call a friend a fucktard, fuckhead, or just plain fucker and they’d laugh; throwing the same insults at an enemy would probably elicit the same response.  In politics, ‘terrorist’, ‘Nazi’, and ‘communist’ still seem to invoke some indignation among the slurs’ recipients, but when they come from twenty-four hour news cycle commentators like Glen Beck and Keith Olbermann, they’re pretty hard to take as anything more than parody.

Over the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about how we insult and compliment each other in the States, and I’ve had a hard time coming up with anything really “American” on either the positive or negative side of describing a person.  In my own family, I personally took the most affront at being called thoughtless or selfish (although ‘lazy’ was probably merited more than once), and really liked being described as driven.  But if you think about it, our insults and accolades reveal little about what we, as Americans, revile and value 

The Burera Team - both serious and organized.

In Rwanda, there are two insults and accolades that I hear used most often.  Whether there are others used commonly in Kinyarwanda, I can’t tell you, because I understand a total of perhaps twenty words in that language.  Again and again, all across the country, there are two concepts which people use –  especially when referring to those involved in any activity aimed at bettering the country  - to either praise or offend others: serious and organized.  For example, if I want to express that I think the staff at a particular restaurant provide high quality service, I might say, “This restaurant is really organized.”  This probably means that their servers are courteous, knowledgeable, attentive, and prompt – something you don’t often find here.  If I wanted to articulate my anger that someone showed up to an important meeting an hour late, I might say, “You know, this guy is really not serious.”  

On the other hand, to refer to someone as ‘serious’ is just about the highest compliment you can pay – Rwandans value the image that they are a country on the way up, dedicated to development and, well, serious about getting things done.  To describe a person as serious is, in many ways, to liken them to a patriot.  It’s the ‘serious’ people – from the president down to an accountant of a community-based cooperative – who are perceived as those that drive Rwanda towards success.  The superlative of ‘organized’ is one that I associate with Rwandans’ interpretation of the American workplace  – purposeful, on time, responsive, and prompt (of course, whether the American workplace actually  resembles this perception is another thing entirely).  Being organized refers to an approach or a method, namely efficiency.  Being serious refers to an ethic or a belief about one’s purpose in the overall framework of the country’s development and progress.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into all of this, but hearing these same descriptors over and over again seems to me to be an indication of what people in this country value.  To me, it’s clear that people who work hard to contribute something positive to development in an efficient, professional, and frankly, ‘American’ way are seen as beacons of progress.  Those who are not serious and are disorganized are seen as accomplices in preventing advancement – those who cling to old ways of doing things and who are more concerned with their own betterment than that of the nation.

The liberal artsy fartsy side of me would love to see a study done in lots of different countries and cultures on the biggest insults and compliments one can use to describe someone else.  I think the results would indirectly reveal a lot about what the people in that country or culture value and revile.  I’m not sure what researchers would find out about American culture, other than that we love potty humor and body parts.