INSULTS AND OATHS

Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy-house, is a receiver of stolen goods! Thus spoke the Good Doctor Johnson on clashing with an impertinent Thames waterman and a fine orotund insult it is. Johnson’s contemporary, the agitator John Wilkes, made his sharp contribution too. When an enemy told him he would die either on the gallows or of the pox, he replied: That depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress! The decline of the insult, or at least the well-expressed one, is a sad feature of our thin modern vocabulary.

What the Bench might call “abusive language” is found everywhere. No longer do religious-based oaths cause a sharp intake of breath – my God, go to the Devil, Christ’s Nails or Holy Mary, Mother of God raise hardly an eyebrow. The epithets bastard, bugger or the US’s sonofabitch have long ago lost their ability to shock. The f-word is still frowned upon in polite society, but since 90% of the population do not inhabit polite society, it is commonplace to hear young people f***ing and blinding, depressingly using the only adjective they know. The film industry opened the dam on the use of the f-word some years ago, no doubt in a move to “democratise” the medium, but the end result is much ugly and moronic dialogue. The internet social media use the abbreviations OMG and wtf freely. The c-word was thought unusually offensive and still subject to some kind of taboo, but a lady judge in Chelmsford recently had the following dialogue with a miscreant (23 previous convictions and an ASBO) found guilty of racial abuse and sentenced to 18 months jail:

Miscreant: You are a bit of a c***.

Judge: You are a bit of a c*** yourself. Being offensive to me does not help.

Miscreant: Go f*** yourself!

Judge: You too!

While the judge’s reactions were wholly justified (and widely applauded), I think it was unwise to trade obscenities with such a low-life.

The studied insult is normally more amusing. The waspish Evelyn Waugh had a lengthy feud with insufferable Randolph Churchill. Hearing that Randolph was recovering from lung cancer surgery, Waugh observed: Isn’t modern medicine wonderful? They examined all Randolph’s body and removed the one bit of it that was not malignant!

Evelyn Waugh

Randolph Churchill

   

Britain had a reasonable bunch of insult-purveyors recently. Gilbert Harding, (remember him?) was in the 1950s known as the Rudest Man in England, a title he rather played up to, and journalist Bernard Levin debunked many pompous politicians of the 1950-80s era in his various columns. Referring to Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the eminent Attorney-General and later Lord Dilhorne, Lord Chancellor, as Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner, Lord Stillborn was a typical Levin shaft. Clive James also has a gift with disobliging words: here he is on Boris Johnson:

It’s not his clothes and coiffure, but his personality that makes him look as if he has been rolled on by a horse and then seduced by it. My own guess is that the suavely cool Theresa and the barking head-case Boris will be the greatest political double act since Ferdinand and Isabella, for at least five minutes.

Other ripe Australian insults have emanated from peerless Dame Edna Everage, who has made a 50-year career by hilariously insulting her audience and feisty Germaine Greer gleefully calling a spade a shovel as she mocks transsexual Caitlyn Jenner in her uninhibited prose:

Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn't make you a f***ing woman, I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat but that won’t turn me into a f***ing cocker spaniel... A man who gets his dick chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself.

Caustic Bernard Levin

Philosophic Germaine Greer

Here in Greece the f-word is subordinated to the ever-invoked malakas (wanker, masturbator) as much used as a bantering word among friends as a deadly insult. Last week we swam in the balmy Aegean at the best sandy beach in Samos. A young man allowed his small dog to cool down in the sea and he was immediately assailed by a noisy lady and her 11-year old son who objected to this gross pollution of the ocean. They called him malakas, vlakas (idiot), illithios (stupid). The man gave as good as he got, the air turned blue and an ugly crowd gathered itching for fisticuffs.  Eventually it all calmed down and apparently the young man and an aggressively obese Greek-Australian discovered they had an uncle and/or cousin in common and all was sweetness and light.

My knowledge of curses and insults in other languages is very limited. I am sure the French can do much better than zut alors and sacré bleu and the Germans than verfluchte Scheisse (damned shit), not to mention the Spanish with at least a millennium of suppressed indignation bubbling away. My expert readers can enlighten us all.

It remains for me merely to proclaim Gadzooks!

SMD,

6.9.16

Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2016