Insulting Etymology + Savage Insults from History – Useless Etymology

The following is excerpted and abbreviated from the book Words from Hell: Unearthing the Darkest Secrets of English Etymology.

English is a great language for verbal evisceration, a practice predicated upon a long history of creativity in this arena. Poetry, theater, novels, and, of course, politics have made rich, recurring and visionary use of put-downs, mockery, and derision.

The word “insult” itself is cognate with “assault,” with both tracing back to the Latin salire, “to leap.” Both mean “to leap at,” but in Latin insultare was used both as a word for a physical assault and for a verbal one.

Insults can, of course, be much like assaults. In the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prohibits “personal attacks” during broadcasts of “controversial issues of public importance.” A personal attack in this context is defined as “an attack […] made upon the honesty, character, integrity or like personal qualities of an identified person or group.”

These rules arose in the context of political debates in which candidates resorted to ad hominem arguments—that is, attacking an opponent’s character rather than discussing core issues.

But in addition to their role in oppositional relationships, insults can be all in good fun, featuring in friendlier (albeit playfully combative) relationships. Indeed, they’ve played an integral part in poetic and playful debate for much of the history of the English language.

6 Types of Insults

English writer and literary critic George Puttenham (ca. 1529–90) dissected many types of rhetoric, including dozens of ways of communicating disdain, sarcasm, and mockery, in The Arte of English Poesie (1589). A few of the more entertaining varieties, with both their Greek-derived literary names and their more straightforward names, include:

• Micterismus (literally meaning “a turning up of the nose”), or the “fleering frump”: “when we giue a mocke with a scornefull countenance as in some smiling sort looking aside or by drawing the lippe awry, or shrinking vp the nose.”
• Charientismus (“expression of a disagreeable thing agreeably”), or the privy nip: “when ye giue a mocke vnder smooth and lowly wordes as he that hard one call him all to nought and say, thou art sure to be hanged ere thou dye.”
• Ironia (“irony, dissimulation”), or the dry mock: “as he that said to a bragging Ruffian, that threatened he would kill and slay, no doubt you are a good man of your hands.”
• Sarcasmus (“sarcasm,” literally meaning “to strip off the flesh”), or the bitter taunt: “when we deride with a certaine seueritie [… for example] I haue gone a hunting many times, yet neuer tooke I such a swine before.”
• Asteismus (“witty dialogue”), or the merry scoff, or civil jest: “when we speake by manner of pleasantery, or mery skoffe, that is by a kind of mock, whereof the sence is farreset, & without any gall or offence.”

Flyting: The Original Rap Battle

The noble tradition of roasting one’s friends, enemies and frenemies with wordplay—also known as “flyting” (from the Old English flitan, “to quarrel”) is a storied one in English.

Flyting, earlier simply a word for an argument, is a poetic war of words or entertaining debate in which the two contestants attempt to “out-bard” each other, so to speak. (It’s basically the predecessor to a rap battle.) The humor is often crude and escalates into rhythmic strings of insults.

Although it’s thought to date back much farther, the recorded history of flyting begins in Scotland with The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, which is thought to have been published around the year 1500 and details one such face-off between the court poet (makar) William Dunbar (ca. 1449–died by 1530) and the parson and poet Walter Kennedy (ca. 1455 – ca. 1508):

Cursed croaping crow, I shall gar crop thy tongue croaking
And thou shall cry cormundum on thy knees.
Durch, I shall ding thee till thou dryte and dung, 
And thou shall lick thy lips and swear thou liest.

Similarly, Old Norse Eddic poetry celebrated the exchange of insults with the form known as senna. A commonly cited example of an insult in senna was a combatant describing the words of his opponent as “the mud of the old eagle”—basically, eagle shit, which is also a reference to a poetic myth in which Odin takes the form of an eagle and shits out “the mead of the rhymesters.”

Shakespearean Insults

William Shakespeare’s plays boast an extensive, iconic and often wildly entertaining collection of insults, often delivered in the same spirit (and with the same degree of punishing wit) as the practice of flyting. For just a few examples:

“Thou sodden-witted lord! Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows!” — Troilus and Cressida, Act II, Scene I

“Out of my sight! thou dost infect my eyes.” — Richard III, Act I, Scene II

“’Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin,
you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you
stock-fish! O for breath to utter what is like
thee! you tailor’s-yard, you sheath, you bowcase,
you vile standing-tuck.” — Henry IV Part 1, Act II, Scene IV

“You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!” — Henry IV Part 2, Act II, Scene I

More Shakespearean Abuse

Consider these Shakespearean phrases to hurl at thy friends, enemies, and frenemies: 

• crusty batch of nature
• ragged wart
• dissembling harlot
• three-inch fool
• bloody, bawdy villain
• hateful wither’d hag
• sanguine coward
• huge hill of flesh
• scurvy companion
• trunk of humours
• bolting-hutch of beastliness
• swollen parcel of dropsies
• huge bombard of sack
• stuffed cloak-bag of guts
• father ruffian
• fat as butter
• loathsome as a toad
• cream faced loon
• clay-brained guts
• knotty-pated fool
• whoreson obscene 
• greasy tallow-catch
• damned and luxurious mountain goat
• lump of foul deformity
• poisonous bunch-back’d toad
• poor, base, rascally, cheating lack-linen mate
• the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril
• loathed issue of thy father’s loins
• rag of honour
• eater of broken meats

Read more insult origins and alarming facts about everyday words in Words from Hell.