This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Kilyle: As for the insulting verbform, if it's the one I'm thinking of, I've found two forms (one starting with A, the other with YA). My sensei didn't want me to know what the form meant, but then I found it frequently in the Ranma 1/2 manga. I think it's important to be able to recognize it, at the very least to avoid copying it in your own speech. After much thought on translation, I enjoyed the form "You dare to do that in my exalted presence??" (e.g., "You dare to look at me??" or "You dare to say that to me??") though of course it doesn't get anywhere near a concise or appropriate substitution. (Heh, I used the form in a story I was writing... for an elf who refered to humans as "it" and finally had to actually talk to one.)
(random passer-by): Yeah. That's it. Whenever I see or hear it, my own perception of it is more along the lines of gutter gangster-speak, something like "you [insert your favorite expletives here], you think you can just f***ing walk in and do [whatever]?" I was under the impression that it was the most vulgar, offensive, shocking language Japanese had, even though the it has no inherent meaning in and of itself. In most European languages, vulgarity is religious, scatological, or sexual, in approximately that order of severity. Some Japanese vulgarity is like this, but the worst and most shocking is a variant verb form. Or so it was explained to me, very long ago.
Shockz: Why is the insulting verb form in question "not repeated" on this page? This wiki, while not a Cluster F-Bomb, isn't profanity-unfriendly. I don't know the verb form myself (in fact, numerous Google searches for "Japanese profanity" and such proved fruitless), but I do think it should be listed for informational purposes.
Schierke: For the curious, I edited in said profanity, -yagate. It's not really that harsh, not equivalent to the F-word in my mind (you can say it on a kids' show, for one), idk why the original editor didn't include it. In reply to passer-by: I wouldn't say yagate is the most offensive thing in the language. There's kind of a divide between offense and vulgarity in Japanese - vulgarity is often okay, and you'll hear people making genital gags all the time on TV and the swear for feces - kuso - is really rather mild compared to the English S-equivalent. Offense, however, is something else - common very offensive terms include calling a woman busu (ugly) or calling someone fat (debu) or addressing someone as 'you' rather than saying their name/title.
Historically speaking, I've been told that the word 'umazume' (barren woman) was pretty much as taboo, vulgar and offensive as you could get, but that was fifty years ago and young people now don't really know it.
Unrelated, but I also edited in some stuff about keigo and Kansai-ben. I disagree about o- and go- prefixes being about respect - they can be, but when you're referring to objects (like sake, for instance) it doesn't mean you're honoring the sake, it just means you like to speak with pretty words. So I changed that too.
