Archive for the ‘Insults’ Category

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By their remnants you shall know them

November 29, 2025

It’s penultimate November and the day after Black Friday, and the leftovers from Thanksgiving — my leftovers, being quirkily Korean, are surely not much like yours, but I have them and they are wonderful — will live again in other meals for several more days. And familiar old tv shows will be re-run as a background of pleasant memories.

Today’s re-runs are from the early days of the American police-procedural tv series NCIS. This morning, in the S4 E1 program “Shalom” (from 9/19/06), came a moment described in the episode summary as:

Tony remarks that Sacks is a self-centered, egotistical jackhole

You don’t need to know who Tony and Sacks are, because my interest in the summary is entirely in its notable final word, boldfaced above. A way of calling someone a jackass and an asshole without using a dirty word. The ass is silent. Twice. Only the respectable remnants of the insults are left over.

Now, jackhole isn’t a fresh discovery, even on this blog — though 2006 is 10 years earlier than the cite that set off an earlier posting of mine, “jockhole”, from 9/28/16 (which makes today’s posting “jockhole 2”). Return with me now to that posting.

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Posted in Holidays, Insults, Lexicography, Movies and tv, Portmanteaus, Slang, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Quiet Piggy

November 23, 2025

11 … 2 … 3 it’s Fibonacci day today; the omens foretell 5 in your future, and then 8, and then 13, and then 21, leaping upward in ever-greater jumps, in an elegant spiral of numbers (I used to be a mathematician, and still have a license to chatter enthusiastically about numbers and abstract patterns). This is today’s moment of wonder and delight, the only protection I can offer against what comes next.

A moral monster of great power, dripping corruption and careening into dementia, is the stuff of unbearable nightmare; we are all living in it. Even worse: behind this demonic figure stand cool-headed engineers of death and dominion. But today I talk about the figurehead of their plots, Our Overlord Grabpussy. In two of his recent forays with the press, which I report on here  from a New York Times story of 11/18 by Michael M. Grynbaum (which I believe to be the most accurate and detailed account of these two episodes — which I’ll call Saudi and Pedo); the NYT is behind a paywall for me, but three friends managed to get copies of the text for me.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Insults, Language and politics, Language in social life, Mathematics, Monsters, Morality, Music, Public and private | 2 Comments »

Like a Spanish cow

November 11, 2025

Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:

parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’

I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).

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Posted in Etymology, Formulaic language, French, Idioms, Insults, Morning names, Pragmatics, Stock expressions | 2 Comments »

From the annals of NAA

October 15, 2025

The most recent Stephan Pastis Pearls Before Swine strip:


A classic NAA (non-apology apology): if you take offence, it’s your problem (in the strip: I’m sorry you were offended; ramped up: I’m sorry you’re an oversensitive ninny) (see Edwin L. Battistella’s Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology (Oxford, 2014))

From Wikipedia:

A non-apology apology, sometimes called a backhanded apology, empty apology, nonpology, or fauxpology, is a statement in the form of an apology that does not express remorse for what was done or said, or assigns fault to those ostensibly receiving the apology. It is common in politics and public relations.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Apologies, Insults, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Speech acts, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Gay banter: great big green beans

August 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate August, also (US) 🔧 Labor Sunday 🔨 (everything — September, Labor Day, even World War II, 86 years ago in Poland — breaks tomorrow); meanwhile, it’s all gay banter about green beans, a little festival of G+B

Aric Olnes, on Facebook with his daily alphabetic horticultural message for 8/27 (on these messages, see my 8/17 posting “Miss Marple, with murder on Michaelmas”), a biliteral delight, in G+B:


graceful bushy Green Beans grow briskly generously bequeathing grand bounty

A long, thin object — like a green bean / string bean — can symbolize a tall, thin person (a skinny person); or someone’s long, thin legs; or of course a long penis — so as an enthusiastic phallophiliac, I went with the penises in my response:

— AZ> AO: Those are mighty long beans you got there, pardner!

This is gay banter (itself a G+B expression); AO and I are old friends, both gay, and can exchange personally-directed lubricious remarks that turn on the shared assumption that gay men fantasize about big dicks (whatever their own penises are like and whatever sorts of penises they favor in actual man-on-man sex) and the shared belief that such fantasies are both powerful and ridiculous. This is an instance of banter without an edge, serving to express what we share — also what sets us apart from most people around us — and to reinforce the bond of our friendship. But banter between men, and more specifically between gay men, comes in many forms, ranging from a light touch with just a bit of an edge, to teasing and to more aggressive kidding. What’s going on depends on who’s doing the bantering, to whom, and in what circumstances. So I’ll have some words about that.

And then some appreciation for AO’s ingenuity in constructing his alphabetic titles, in this case for G+B expressions about the seedpods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean. To which I will contribute a long playful list of G+B expressions for anyone who’d like to riff  further on green beans / string beans / snap beans. (more…)

Posted in Alliteration, Events and occasions, Formulaic expressions, Formulaic language, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Insults, Intention, It's Just Stuff, Language and plants, Language play, Masculinity, Metaphor, My life, Phallicity, Pragmatics, Routines and rituals, Speech acts | 1 Comment »

A revilation of the NYT business department

March 14, 2025

I come to revile the New York Times‘s business department. Don’t tell me to complain to them; I’ve done that, and nothing came of it beyond my getting insulted by the reps on the phone (and this is how I spent the early hours of this day, after naively trying to take up an NYT offer to resubscribe to the paper). So the true background for this posting comes from a Monty Python script: Argument Clinic / Hitting on the Head Lessons (emphasis added):

Man [who has been through arguments and abuse and is now at complaints]: I want to complain.

Complainer: You want to complain! Look at these shoes. I’ve only had them three weeks and the heels are worn right through.

Man: No, I want to complain about…

Complainer: If you complain nothing happens, you might as well not bother.

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Posted in Clothing, Insults, My life, News | 1 Comment »

A menagerie of monikers

February 25, 2025

Today on Facebook, in a report on grocery prices, I reviled Helmet Grabpussy, Felonious Bunk, and the Anaranjado Rapist. Hana Filip then initiated a meta-discussion, about my discussion:

— HF: What a nice collection of monikers

— AZ >HF: Everyone should have a hobby (and, said the Cold Duke of Coffin Castle, mine is being wicked — but mine is collecting names for that obloquy magnet, 45+47, the Orange Menace)

— AZ: Ok, ok: The Cold Duke is from James Thurber’s The Twelve Clocks. Not everyone knows this, but you probably should

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Posted in Books, Insults, Names, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

Elegantized insults

January 29, 2025

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.

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Posted in Euphemism, Figurative language, Humor, Insults, Metaphor, Pragmatics, Slang, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs | 5 Comments »

Sucking the life out of the state

January 28, 2025

Returning to a very old topic on this blog, making small advances on some outstanding puzzles. It starts with my 6/8/11 posting (yes, 14 years ago) “Parasites and the body politic”, about

my dismayed reaction to recent political assaults on teachers (and, more generally, public employees) as drains on the economy, selfishly demanding decent wages and benefits while being “unproductive”, producing nothing of significance. Lots of things are going on at once here — contempt for the working classes and for service workers like maids, cooks, gardeners, and janitors (and, yes, teachers); classic American anti-intellectualism (cue Richard Hofstadter); marketplace valuation of people’s worth; and more — but parallel attitudes surface in the way many people view academics, so it hits close to home for me.

Then the anecdote. Some years ago I was at some large public function involving people of money and substance and, wine glass in hand, struck up a conversation with another attendee. This guy plunged right in by asking me what I do [for a living]. (In many cultures, the leading question would be some version of “Where are you from?”, meaning “Who are your people?”, but in ours it has to do with occupation. All such questions are designed to position a stranger socially.)

I said I was a university professor, and, without waiting to identify himself occupationally, he said

Artists and scholars are parasites on the body politic. [call this State Suckers, SS for short]

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Posted in Academic life, Formulaic language, Idioms, Insults, Language and politics, My life, Speech acts | Leave a Comment »

A dozen (or so) senses of the C-word

November 22, 2024

(Well, consider the title if this posting, which tells you that it’s going to get into some vivid descriptions of sexual parts and sexual acts — plus a photo that’s just barely WordPressable — and you’ll see that it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; and from here on, you’re going to get the C-word raw and unconcealed, but your enthusiasm for this dirty talk will probably be diminished when it turns out that this posting is mostly about lexical semantics)

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Posted in Address terms, Context, Dialects, Gay porn, Insults, Language and the body, Language change, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Personification, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | 6 Comments »

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