Archive for the ‘Insults’ Category

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A bulletin from Pejora, the land of derogation and insult

September 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate September, Labor Day weekend in my country, autumn in my hemisphere, and the 84th year of my life (I’m about to be — this coming Wednesday — 83, a nice prime number)

Meanwhile, a comment by Stewart Kramer on my 8/22 posting “The Jerk Fest” leads me to some reflections on where slurs — like jerk approximating asshole — come from. A slur like this use of jerk, or asshole itself,

— levels a culturally serious charge against its target (in the case of asshole, involving, among other things, arrogance, pretension, and rudeness)

— attributes this offense to a character flaw in the target (in Geoffrey Nunberg’s analysis of asshole, the flaw of culpable obtuseness — about their own importance, about the needs of others and the way they’re perceived by them)

— and insults the target.

The slur jerk developed from jerk referring to a fool or incompetent — what I’ll call a (mere) devaluation, meaning a term that refers to an identity regarded as of little worth. The examples that turn up in discussions of pejoration that I’ll cite involve terms referring to the devalued identities of fools and the inept (old-style jerk, dope, dummy); rustics and farm folk (hick, hillbilly, hayseed); and women (chick, dame, girl), but an extended discussion would take in (at least) terms referring to oddballs and nonconformists; foreigners; members of certain racioethnic groups; the aged; the disabled; and members of sexual minorities. (Bear in mind how astoundingly culture-specific all this material is.)

The route from devaluation to slur involves elevating cultural associations with the devalued identities to connotations of the devaluation and then to its semantic content: nasty metonymy, if you will. Fools and incompetents are seen as prone to egotistical interactions with others, so that foolish jerk begins to pick up the connotations of arrogance and rudeness, which can then become conventional aspects of meaning, leading to assholish jerk. The various stages in this progression can co-occur with one another for some time, as is certainly the case with jerk as described in the pieces quoted in my “Jerk Fest” posting.

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Posted in Insults, Language and society, Language change, Lexicography, Pragmatics, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

Today’s satiric artwork

July 24, 2023

Also today’s food art. From Bill Badecker on Facebook this morning:

[The Orange Menace]’s lawyers have assailed the Georgia case in their efforts to derail it ahead of any indictments. “It is one thing to indict a ham sandwich,” some of his lawyers said in a recent court filing. “To indict the mustard-stained napkin that it once sat on is quite another.” – NYT, July 22

With this portrait of Helmet Grabpussy, a.k.a. Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich:

Fond as I am of my own mocking names — do not utter the true name of the demon, lest you invoke him — Helmet Grabpussy and The Orange Menace — I admire Mustard Staining Cheesy Ham Sandwich. It is, alas, unwieldy, though I suppose it could be initialized to MSCHS (which has a nice rhythm). Or condensed to MusChee.

 

Posted in Abbreviation, Art, Initialisms, Insults, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and the law, Sarcasm and irony | Leave a Comment »

Bro insults

October 15, 2022

The Zits strips for 10/10 and 10/11, on bro insults: what bros do instead of complimenting one another. Because actually complimenting another guy would be kinda faggy, totally not according to the Boy Code. And girls just don’t understand this basic fact.


(#1) Not any old insults, but ritual insults, like baboon-butt, which won’t be taken seriously; there’s no injury here


(#2) And monkey-heinie and flame brain, all of them serving not as insults but as signs of male bonding — male friendship and mutual regard

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Insults, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

dildo, the insult

April 1, 2021

A Twitter comment on yesterday’s posting on dildos, the sex toys — entitled “Mitch is always DTF”  (Mitch is a dildo) — reminded me that the word dildo has developed a use as a slur or term of abuse, and that — despite this blog’s long-standing attentions to dildos as sex toys, to slurs in general, and to the development of vocabulary in the sexual domain into terms of abuse — I hadn’t previously recorded this development here. So here comes a gang of fuckin’ stupid dildos.

From GDoS:

1 a general term of abuse: a fool, an incompetent [clear examples are 20th century; in American slang dictionaries in the 1960s, e.g. College Undergraduate Slang Study 1967-8 Dildo A person who always does the wrong thing; 1998 what a pair of fuckin dildos] …

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Posted in Etymology, Gender and sexuality, Insults, Language of sex, Nonsense, Slurs | 1 Comment »

candy-ass faggots

September 4, 2020

(Tons of abusive and offensive language; some sex talk, but only in passing.)

Another posting from the back files, which somehow got disregarded. Investigating the slang candy-ass, I was taken back to this tale of invective from Peter Cavanaugh’s WordPress blog entry “Rocket to Stardom” from 3/26/09 about radio station WNDR in Syracuse NY (the crucial bit is boldfaced):

WNDR’s News Director was Bud Stapleton, a good “friend of the Judge”. He was tough and mean, a former Marine. Bud was a World War Two vet who spent several serious years “island hopping” in the South Pacific and to whom a peaceful return to civilian life was “a fucking pain in the ass”. He was a certified American hero.

… Syracuse, New York is also the home of Syracuse University and the celebrated Newhouse School of Communications.

The Newhouse faculty regarded “WNDR Action Central News” as professionally falling somewhere in between pig semen and rat vomit. They went out of their way expounding with exhausted exasperation upon the degrading, disgusting, depraving journalistic waste product available every hour on the hour at good old 1260 on their AM dial.

It was a classic case of unbridled mutual contempt.

Bud Stapleton characteristically categorized the Newhouse professors as “Candy-ass faggots who can suck my cock on the 6-0-Clock News”. He made frequent reference to “shoving their fucking ivory tower right up their baby-boy butts”.

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Posted in Insults, Lexical semantics, Pragmatics, Semantics, Semantics of compounds, Slang, Slurs | Leave a Comment »

Smearing and taunting

June 17, 2020

(Adapted and expanded from a Facebook comment of mine a while back. Some coarse sexual language, notably from American newsmakers, but also enough about sexual bodies and mansex from me to make the posting dubious for kids and the sexually modest.)

Every so often, MSNBC commentator Ali Velshi tartly notes — alluding to the Imperator Grabpussy’s smears of President Barack Obama as a Muslim born in Kenya — that he is a Muslim who was born in Kenya (though he grew up in Canada).

There’s a linguistic point here, having to do with relevance and implicature. Why does Velshi say this? Yes, it’s true, but then “The freezing point of water is 32F” is true, but if Velshi had said that it would have been bizarre, because it would have been irrelevant in the context. So Velshi’s religion and nativity are relevant in the context. Cutting through a whole lot of stuff, I would claim that Velshi is implicating something like “Being one myself, I know from Muslims born in Kenya, and I know that Barack Obama is no Muslim born in Kenya”. And THAT brings me to a piece I’ve been wrestling with some time, about Grabpussy Jr. jeering at Mitt Romney, taunting him by calling him a pussy. (I have a Velshian response of my own to that.)

Hang on; this will go in several directions.

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Posted in Childhood, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Implicature, Insults, Masculinity, Metaphor, Negation, Relevance, Taboo language and slurs, Toys and games, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »

That bastard mongrel half-breed, the tromboon

July 25, 2018

To yesterday’s posting “Hybrid referent, portmanteau name” (mostly about the flumpet, with a bit on the fluba), Robert Coren added a comment about Peter Schickele / P.D.Q. Bach and his invention, the tromboon:

(#1)

The tromboon is a musical instrument made up of the reed and bocal of a bassoon, attached to the body of a trombone in place of the trombone’s mouthpiece. It combines the sound of double reeds and the slide for a distinctive and unusual instrument. The name of the instrument is a portmanteau of “trombone” and “bassoon”. The sound quality of the instrument is best described as comical and loud.

The tromboon was developed by Peter Schickele, a skilled bassoonist himself, and featured in some of his live concert and recorded performances. Schickele called it “a hybrid – that’s the nicer word – constructed from the parts of a bassoon and a trombone; it has all the disadvantages of both”. This instrument is called for in the scores of P. D. Q. Bach’s oratorio The Seasonings, as well as the Serenude (for devious instruments) and Shepherd on the Rocks, With a Twist. (Wikipedia link)

Here I’m focusing on that’s the nicer word: just what did Schickele think (in 2008) was a less nice, more offensive, way to refer to a hybrid (more specifically, to someone of mixed race, which is probably where the insult vocabulary for hybrids is going to come from)? Specifically, what does an old white guy addressing a mostly white audience think might be a more offensive way to refer to hybrids? (A young black guy would probably insult a half-black half-white guy by calling him white.)

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Posted in Insults, Language and race, Metaphor, Music, Portmanteaus, Silliness | 6 Comments »

Rubber and glue

July 23, 2018

The June 26th One Big Happy, with an updated version of a bit of childlore:

(#1)

It starts out traditionally, with a retort to insult beginning “I’m rubber and you’re glue…”, but then it takes a modern-tech social-media turn (while preserving the glue … you rhyme).

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Posted in Folklore, Insults, Language of children, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Pragmatics | Leave a Comment »

The profane domain

May 7, 2018

… and pornlinguistics.

Recently on Facebook, from Dan Everett and then Rob Pensalfini, calls for research in what I’ll call the profane domain of linguistics:

Dan: How about a pop-up book on the interaction of pornography and linguistic relativity?

Rob: It’s about time for a revival of McCawley’s field of pornolinguistics (and scatolinguistics, while we’re at it).

Dan is a frequent presence on this blog; Rob is new (and I’ll introduce him below). Rob asks about the profane domain, under the name “pornolinguistics and scatolinguistics” (a label I seem to have been responsible for, in 1967, in a moment of careless playfulness). Dan asks about linguistic aspects of pornography (I’ll put pop-up books — they already exist — and linguistic relativity aside in this posting), a topic several commenters thought must be barren, though I’ve found quite a lot to say about it on this blog.

So: on the profane domain, other names for it, and resources on this blog about it. And then on pornography in a similar vein.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Insults, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexicography, Linguists, Pragmatics, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

He meant to say “supine”

February 11, 2018

Wilson Gray on ADS-L on the 6th:

“She was lying on her back, when she was stabbed, in the prone position.”

He meant to say, “in the supine position,” of course.

There’s no “of course” here. No, that is almost surely not what the speaker meant to say; I’d wager he intended to say exactly what he did say. It’s just not what Wilson thinks the speaker should have said. (Or he’s mocking people who talk this way, though I failed to detect any raised eyebrows in what he wrote so briefly and dismissively.)

We have here a widespread vulgar confusion, a failure to distinguish

between inadvertent errors, things that are “wrong” for the person who produces them, and advertent errors, things that are ok so far as the producer is concerned but “wrong” from the point of view of at least some other people. (Faced with [the first], you call in the psycholinguist; faced with [the second], you call in the sociolinguist.) (Language Log link)

On top of that, Wilson has the sociolinguistic facts wrong, through a confusion between ordinary language and technical language: supine is a technical term for a bodily postion (lying flat on one’s back), used in certain specific domains (anatomy, sport, and shooting, in particular); in those domains, its counterpart (referring to lying flat on one’s belly) is prone, but in ordinary language, outside these specific domains, prone can refer to lying flat in general, and supine isn’t used at all.

The mistake here lies in assuming that technical, domain-specific (medical, botanical, technologcal, etc.) vocabulary is the true, correct, uniquely valid scheme for naming. From my 7/27/15 posting “Misleadingly named animals”, on zoological names:

The terminology “true fly” and “true bug” (etc.) here arises from the attitude that the naming practices of biologists are the only valid (true) naming schemes — what I’ll call technicalism. In the case of fly and bug, technicalism is remarkable from the historical point of view, since the specialized use of these nouns represents a decision to use perfectly ordinary vocabulary as technical terminology by drastically restricting its reference.

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Posted in Etymology, Insults, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Mistakes, Names, Ordinary vs. technical lg, Politeness, Usage attitudes | 3 Comments »

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