For Christmas, <a href=”Jean gave me The Big Book of Being Rude, and to quote Bart when Homer gave him the machine that says “Go to hell at the push of a button, I promise you I will never get tired of this. It offers 7000 slang insults, and that should be just about enough to get me through a new year of job hunting and serving on my homeowners association board.
For instance, I recently found myself drawn into a heated email correspondence among my fellow board members which included the question, “How do we verify the number of squirrels to know if we are being fairly charged for this service? Rather than joining the debate on rodent enumeration technologies, I could have picked a rejoinder from the book and told them all to go and piss up a shutter, which the book indicates is an English expression from the 1910s. Of course, I would probably need to have that one approved by the architectural committee.
The book offers many opportunities to be rude in a modern context “it is not for the PC: no insulting term is left out”, but also gives us the chance to bring some historical insults back into use. Maybe the next time I get four steps into the interview process only to be told that the job is not going to be filled after all, I can seek my retaliatory inspiration from the 16th century and call the HR person a bel-shangle, clumperton, doddypoll or ninnyhammer. And why tell somebody merely to go to hell when you can tell him to go to hell and help his mother make bitch pies? “English, mid-18C: late 19C”.
“A former colleague of mine had a psychotherapist mother-in-law who was apparently far too nice a lady to swear effectively. After being cut off in traffic, she rolled down her window and screamed, “You can wipe your ass on my coat! After Ian and his wife stopped laughing, they explained to her that, not only would no one ever say that, it would in fact be far worse for her than for the other driver.”
The book takes a scholarly tone, giving time periods and etymologies for the words, but some of them seem a bit spurious. Are there really 23 euphemisms for crackhead? “Hubba pigeon” for instance? And how long did “Kuwaiti tanker survive as rhyming slang for “wanker? I for one was on US campuses for far too long in the 1980s and never heard anyone refer to an idiot as a “McFly “”a character in the Back to the Future films” or “dorkmunder “”dork + poss. Dortmunder Union Pils”. Right. So often our insults came from the names of obscure German beers.
Maybe I’ve got a kangaroo loose in the top paddock, but I think some of the insults are just plain dumb. I find it hard to believe that Australians in the 1930s couldn’t come up with anything cleverer than “as silly as a bag” Luckily, they put their best minds to work and a decade later issued the new, improved “silly as a hatful of arseholes”
While amusing, many are not very useful for the average 21st century American. However, should you find the need to insult someone from New South Wales, you might try “cornstalk or “crow-eater” “North Carolinians, by the way, are goober-grubbers.”