Useful insult words
Do you ever wish there were more words to describe someone so infuriating and reprehensible that ordinary insults won’t do? I’m not including serial killers or terrorists – they’re in a special category of their own.
I mean the newsmakers who lie, abuse power, and squander our money. They’re on the TV news so much that the line between real news and comedy has all but disappeared. Some of them hold public office. Others just threaten to run for office. Either way, they push our vocabularies to the limit as we shout back at the TV. (Or am I the only one who does that?)
Swear words lost their impact long ago. Relaxed obscenity standards now allow almost anything in prime time. And if you were interviewed on camera and stepped over a line, they would just bleep the sound anyway.
No, it’s time to revive some colorful and archaic words you probably don’t even know about. Although the origins of these words are cloudy, they share a certain fresh nastiness because they’ve not been overused. They sound like characters from a Dickens novel, but you must admit they make pretty imaginative put-downs:
Mumpsimus
Sticking to a belief or practice in the face of incontrovertible evidence that it is wrong. For example, someone who insists on ordering expresso or introducing bills declaring the earth to be flat. (“Look out the window – cornfields as far as the eye can see. Can’t grow corn on a basketball!”)
Slubberdegullion
A filthy, slobbering, worthless, villainous wretch.
Pettifogger
An underhanded or disreputable legal practitioner who deals with petty cases or quibbles over trifling matters.
Snollygoster
An unscrupulous person who will do anything to get elected, regardless of principles or allegiance to a platform.
You probably can’t use any of these to win at Scrabble because they have too many letters. But just once, I’d like to hear a candidate in a political debate say, “What a mumpsimus! You, sir, are nothing but a slubberdegullionous, pettifogging snollygoster!”
As meanwhile, in the control room, someone asks, “So … do I bleep that or what?”
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