elegantized insult: a replacement for an insulting word or phrase that’s notably more elegant than the replaced item, by using material from either the specialized or technical Greco-Latin stratum of English vocabulary or its very formal registers, for the purpose of humor, either pointed mockery (amplifying the insult) or droll playfulness (entertaining the audience).
Two examples conveying ‘without courage’. An example of the first type (and conveying mockery) came to me a few days ago in e-mail: anorchídic as a replacement for the insult ball-less. Then an example of the second type (and conveying jocularity): lacking intestinal fortitude for the insult gutless. I’ll go through the examples in some detail, and then riff some on sophisticated insults, in various senses of sophisticated.
Case 1. On 1/25 e-mail from Jeff Kaplan (Jeffrey Kaplan, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at San Diego State Univ.) reported that his SDSU colleague E. Nicholas Genovese, Professor Emeritus of Classics and Humanities, had just used anorchidic in a message savaging US Senator Mitch McConnell. Jeff savored Genovese’s word choice, saying:
I like the word anorchidic. I figured it out, I figured, but I looked it up to make sure. Lovely word.
From a medical dictionary, the Greek-based technical term anorchidism ‘absence of one or both testes’, hence anorchidic ‘ball-less, without balls’, with figurative balls ‘courage or nerve’ rather than the literal raunchy slang balls ‘testes’.
Calling McConnell anorchidic is saying, in medical Greek, that he’s a ball-less wonder, a flat-out coward, and it’s saying that in a smirky, you don’t even know what I’m calling you, do you, Senator? fashion, landing an extra slap in McConnell’s face.
Case 2. From Britannica Dictionary:
[noncount] noun fortitude: formal mental strength and courage that allows someone to face danger, pain, etc. She has endured disappointments with fortitude and patience. ✿ The phrase intestinal fortitude is used informally in U.S. English as a humorous replacement for guts, which means ‘courage’. They accused him of lacking intestinal fortitude. [= of being a coward]
Hence: lacking intestinal fortitude for gutless ‘lacking courage or determination’, with guts literally ‘stomach, belly, intestines’, figuratively ”personal courage and determination; toughness of character’.
This time, people are using lacking intestinal fortitude as a jokey replacement for the insult gutless ‘cowardly’, a move that (euphemistically) takes some of the edge off the crude gutless. The 9-syllable elevated-register expression is a bit of silly language play, japery for an audience.
Sophisticated insults. I pulled the term elegantized insult more or less out of a hat for these two types of examples. There might well be some descriptive and analytic literature about these phenomena, but I’ve found no way to access it. I assume there is some scholarly literature on insults in general, but again I’ve found no way to access it.
What there is, in overwhelming abundance, is collections of insults of many kinds, some of them just meant to be funny, some meant as advice on how to insult others effectively. Some of these collect what are said to be sophisticated insults, suggesting great worldly knowledge, cleverness, subtlety, and refinement. Some insults are sledge hammers, a few are rapiers.
Some collections of sophisticated insults are lists of relatively rare adjectives with vivid meanings and with negative affect, such as:
insipid, twee, fatuous, vacuous, craven, obtuse
Others are sometimes labeled as gentlemanly insults — mean-spirited daggers in velvet gloves for gentlefolk to use to stunning effect in conflicts and confrontations, for example:
if I throw a stick, will you leave?; you are the reason God created the middle finger; you have delusions of adequacy
(The ghost of Dorothy Parker hovers over this category.)
But here I’m just randomly selecting promising stuff from page after page of lists. It would be nice to find some order in this material.
January 29, 2025 at 9:08 pm |
I’ve long described ball-busting women as orchioclastic. Such words are rather easy to invent.
Is there a term for a class of words that look like they must be derived from Greek or Latin antecedents, but in fact are entire fabrications? I call them mock-learnèd. Think of Snuffy Smith’s bodacious, from a wholly imaginary Latin bodax. Rambunctious? Conniption? Masturbate? There are really quite a lot of these words.
January 30, 2025 at 11:37 am |
I’ve always called them mock-learnèd too — an entirely descriptive label; I don’t know that we need a more technical term here.
January 30, 2025 at 1:26 pm |
I Googled mock-learned and found that it has an entirely different meaning >>”Mock-learned” may refer to the process of using mock objects or data to simulate the behavior of real objects or data in testing.<< (the Google AI summary)
I've never heard mock-learnèd used in the way I used it – I thought I'd invented it? Did you invent it also? Seems to me also that this word is quite sufficient.
January 30, 2025 at 1:55 pm |
Whoa! What you found was the technical term mock-learned, with the (monosyllabic) PSP of the verb learn (I believe that mock-learned is accented on its first element, like a compound) — not mock-learnèd, with the (disyllable) adjective learnèd (accented on its second element, like other Adv+Adj combinations).
The modifier mock (like the modifier faux) can function as an Adj (mock / faux leather) or an Adv (mock / faux Georgian), but it’s just a modifier, and can combine freely with N or Adj, so things like mock-learnèd aren’t really invented / devised / coined, the way technical terms are, but are available as free combinations, like, oh, purple bungalows or hugely triangular.
January 31, 2025 at 2:40 pm |
Just sighted in the wild, in a passionate rant on current events: