There is a Homeric quality about the cowboy’s profanity and vulgarity that pleases rather than repulses.
-Introduction, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, John Lomax, 1910
Ummak, Ummak, Ummak! Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother!
-Abdullah, cursing a camel he is saddling, Voice of the Whip
A tribal bard, a teller of tales, a poet at the fire. Homer composed epic verse using the same epithets again and again…wine-dark sea, rosy-fingered dawn, white-armed women, god-like men, and “his mother, beauteous queen of heaven”. And your mother? Ask Abdullah when he’s in a better mood.