Marco Reus, the captain of the Borussia Dortmund football club, which is currently the best in the German Bundesliga, is one of the top German footballers, a member of the national team and a German born in Dortmund. Still, in difficult moments, his likes to express his anger and frustration in the language and in the way that everyone from “our region” can understand in more ways than one. He has proved this in the latest TV commercial for Opel, which is a sponsor of his club, in which he used a Croatian profanity, reports Index.hr on December 31, 2018.
Reus had to prove his skills and hit a small area of a screen stretched over the open car door, a few metres from him. But he did not manage to hit the ball through the hole, which was followed by a swearword (about what he would do to someone’s mother – you can guess what it is), in a language easily understood by anyone living in the territory of former Yugoslavia.
The video can be seen on Twitter.
There is little doubt that Reus has learned the profanity from his teammates and coaches that came from the region to play in Germany. He shared the dressing room in Dortmund with Croat Ivan Perišić, and Serbs Neven Subotić and Željko Buvač.
It is well-known that the first thing that players from this region do when they move overseas is to introduce their hosts to the incredibly rich and lavish vocabulary of some of the most creative and brutal profanities and swearwords used by the people on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
Foreigners, whose corpus of profanities is minuscule when compared to the Balkans, are generally fascinated by the swear words and start using them. There are numerous examples, from Kwadwo Asamoah from Ghana, who has enriched his vocabulary thanks to Croat Marcelo Brozović, to US basketball player Kobe Bryant, whose teacher was Serbian Vlade Divac.
The only issue here is why did the profanity end up in the material posted on Twitter: is it possible that no-one understood what Reus said or was this perhaps a prank by someone who knew very well what was said?
More news on the Croatian language can be found in our Lifestyle section.
Translated from Index.hr.
