They wield their language like a club against their enemies

Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without any English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner. The range of Afrikaans he commands is thin and bodiless; there is a whole dense world of slang and allusion commanded by real Afrikaans boys—of which obscenity is only a part—to which he has no access. There is a manner that Afrikaners have in common too—a surliness, an intransigence, and, not far behind it, a threat of physical force (he thinks of them as rhinoceroses, huge, lumbering, strong-sinewed, thudding against each other as they pass)—that he does not share and in fact shrinks from. They wield their language like a club against their enemies.

J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (1997), 124