Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Today’s Scenes from a Multiverse:

The strip is about “respecting beliefs”, but here I’m picking on the amoral cockgoblin slur.

Cockgoblin sure does sound like a sexual slur. But here’s what Paul “Froggy” Schneider says on his cockgoblin site, where people are invited to nominate others as cockgoblins:

Generally, a cockgoblin is any person or group you happen to either be annoyed with, loathe or generally have contempt for. I originally heard the term “cock goblin” on Slashdot. An anonymous coward was making an rather ignorant remark in a particular thread, and one of the replies had nothing more than the words, “Shut up you cock goblin.” I proceeded then to burst out in laughter for about five minutes.

After that hijinx, I began using the term constantly to refer to anyone that happened to be on my “bad side” at that moment, from the guy that cut me off on my way to work that morning to someone I had perhaps met and generally didn’t like. The term stuck. Others here at CWRU began using the term as well.

Contrary to what you might be telling yourself right now, a cockgoblin does not (necessarily) refer to anyone that engages in the act of oral sex, nor is it meant at all to be a derisive term used against members of the homosexual community. It isn’t even really an indictment of goblins. It’s just a word. A word that rolls off the tongue and seems, to me at least, to somehow ‘make sense’ when attempting to vocalize discontent with someone or something. In my view, it’s a lot better than calling someone a ‘motherfucker’ or ‘asshole’.

So, if you know of a cockgoblin in your life and wish to tell the world who he, she or it is, please feel free. Whatever you write on these pages are nothing more then what you state to be YOUR OPINIONS. They are definitely not my opinions, nor those of anyone else in the world. Hell, you might not even agree or believe in your OWN opinions. Therefore, take this site and all the entries with a grain of salt. If you can’t do that, do the world a favor and lighten up a bit.

Linguistic points of passing interest: hijinx for hijinks, which is plural, but here used as a singular (note that hijinx); and whatever you write on these pages with plural verb agreement — singular is standard — perhaps by agreement with the nearest.

Otherwise, cockgoblin looks like an obscenity used as a generalized slur (like motherfucker and asshole).

This entry was posted on November 29, 2011 at 11:43 am and is filed under Agreement, Linguistics in the comics, Syntax, Taboo language and slurs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.