Hurensohn

What it means

1. 1.

   The strongest common insult in German. Directed at a person it insults his mother, which is precisely why it functions as a fight-starter in a way Arschloch does not.

2. 2.

   Among teenage boys and in German rap it is partly bleached into a general intensifier or exclamation, thrown at objects and situations rather than people. That bleaching is real but it is confined to that register — nobody else hears it as anything but the full-strength original.

Literally: Son of a whore.

Examples with translations

• Nenn mich noch einmal so, du Hurensohn.

  Call me that one more time, you son of a bitch.

  Note: This is the sentence before a fight, not a turn of phrase.

• Der Drucker geht nicht, dieser Hurensohn.

  The printer's not working, the bastard thing.

  Note: The bleached use, and only plausible from a young male speaker.

Where it comes from

An old Germanic construction with parallels across Europe, but its present frequency in German is recent and contact-driven: Turkish and Arabic both have high-salience mother insults, and German rap from the 2000s onward made this one the default translation. Courts treat it as one of the most expensive insults on the tariff.

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

HS