Uncle Maledictus

"To his readers he is 'Uncle Maledictus,' the majordomo of blasphemy and master of insults, slurs and naughty words," Marianna Beck writes in her cover profile of scholar and publisher Reinhold Aman. "He speaks six languages, reads about 25 others, and can insult you in 200 more," Beck continues. "Three thousand people, from Keokuk to Bangkok and from Alaska to Australia, subscribe to his yearly journal Maledicta, a scholarly cornucopia of linguistic assaults" packed with papers such as "Chinese Values as Depicted in Mandarin Terms of Abuse." Denied tenure at UW-Milwaukee two years after students there voted him one of the school's top faculty members, Aman moved to Waukesha, where he has amassed one of the world's largest collection of materials in his specialty - 4,000 books and articles, 15,000 pages of research and 2,500 news clippings spanning 220 languages. He cites ethnocentricity and xenophobia as the roots of most aggressive language, telling Beck: "To overcome our innate fear of people who look, talk, dress or act differently from us, we laugh at them, call them names, and thereby subjugate them to prove that we are superior. Children are masters of this." Now living in California, Aman remains editor and publisher of Maledicta Press, which maintains an online presence at sonic.net/maledicta. Beck goes on to a career as editor and publisher of the erotica journal Libido.