I spoke with my Romanian colleague, poet, Radu Vancu about something nice. I was introducing him to our two word poem “Merjir Serjin” (Reject Serzh), and he introduced me to the odyssey of the slogan “MuiePSD” (pronounced moye pesede). Muie is a rude Romanian swear word which represents the act of oral sex, and PSD is their RPA.

It all began with a Romanian, living in Switzerland, who entered Romania with a MuiePSD license plate and was pulled over by traffic police.

Naturally, after a lot of noise, a number of identical license plate numbers began to pop up from different corners of Europe, and MuiePSD quickly turned into a popular slogan of a popular resistance and can now be seen anywhere, even from an airplane.

Now everyone, women-men, old-young, freely swear at the authorities, meanwhile, using the term mui without the PSD is considered to be too harsh.

I have tried to recall all the slogans and rhymes in Armenia in recent decades, and surprisingly the most rude one was “AshoTSyan Siktir” (Ashotyan Fuck Off). It would be wrong to conclude that we are more polite than he Romanian people, but we had a personal approach when it came to Ashotyan, and the accepted and repeated use of Her-a-tsir (Go-A-way) was replaced with “Siktir” (Fuck Off). Why?

Thanks to a simple reason, because the rude language of the resistance is directly proportional to the thickness of the addressee’s leather.

Both the PSD and the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) would like to sue “offenders,” but how can the government call people to court, if the insult is personalized as in this case?

You cannot demand political correctness from the public, what you have in your mind will be thrown back in your face. Reap what you sow.

Citizens are free to curse the authorities as much as they want, either current or previous, as they do not sow discrimination against any ethnic, religious, sexual or other vulnerable group, but rather are expressing their emotion and tough criticism towards the government which, by the way, is not a supernatural force, but rather a collective personality. Each of which can be subjected to a public discourse in one situation.

The laugh of a dead chicken comes when those that closed A1+ are giving speeches about the restriction of the freedom of speech and expression – not to mention that they are trying to describe the nationwide rejection as “hate speech.”

Even the citizen who uses the most rude words when swearing at the authorities, enjoy the right to freedom of speech and expression, and this is an indication of an atmosphere of free expression not of hatred, whether you like it or not.

I talked to my colleague about the word “siktir” coming from Turkish, and then an anecdote: A crow appears at a kindergarten, the children excitedly shout “siktir,” the nanny says, “Dear children, you aren’t allowed to use such ugly words, say shoo shoo, it will fuck off.”

Radu did not get the humor, but chucked out of politeness.

“You know,” he said, “my seven year old boy came one day and asked ‘dad, what does the word muie mean?’ I said it is a bad word that educated people use only in the phrase ‘muiePSD,’ if you hear it, say ‘PSD’ and they will as if to say thank you will say, ‘you’re welcome.’”

What else can you say? Shoo shoo…

Armen Ohanyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.