{"id":17243,"date":"2016-06-18T10:11:03","date_gmt":"2016-06-18T14:11:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=17243"},"modified":"2016-06-18T10:22:37","modified_gmt":"2016-06-18T14:22:37","slug":"generic-sobriquets-of-dispraise-upon-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2016\/06\/18\/generic-sobriquets-of-dispraise-upon-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Generic sobriquets of dispraise upon you"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"John<\/a>

John Cleese as the “French Taunter” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail<\/em>, 1975<\/p><\/div>\n

As the election season heats up so do people’s tempers, and this may lead one to say things that in other circumstances could become occasions for regret. They might be rude references to a person’s place of origin, or gender; they might imply an unfortunate disability that is impolitic to mention. They may refer to suspected lamentable and unnatural behaviors.<\/p>\n

Fans of British English will know that denizens of the Empire, over their many centuries of reserved but total dismissal of divergent viewpoint, have created a rich fund of non-specific insulting terms that could serve us well in this angry political year.<\/p>\n

Twit, git, prat, and berk are common examples, and are satisfyingly monosyllabic. Nothing signals absolute\u00a0rejection like a single syllable wrapped in hard consonants, followed by a period–or an exclamation point, if one is sufficiently incensed. But plonker and pillock, tosser and wanker also have their adherents. And creative evolutionary pressure on the tongue has resulted in hybrid monickers such as twonk, combining the qualities (whatever these might be) of twit and plonker.<\/p>\n

Not that there aren’t similar offerings available in the American dialects. I submit to you dweeb and geek, nerd and jerk, or, for the polysyllabic, goober.<\/p>\n

Anglophone Canadians seems to lag the rest of us in generic insults, or else they are too polite to catalog them all online. I find only the well-known hoser, and (new to me) chirp, a suspected cognate of jerk, that are both unique to Canada and non-specific enough to mention here. Or it may be that I am just a gorby–an ignorant tourist–and haven’t tapped the correct vein of Canadian spleen.<\/p>\n

So there you are. If you find yourself hot under the collar, but don’t want to actually say anything about someone’s mama, there are many options that will allow you to–like the French castle guard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail<\/em>–fart in their general direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the election season heats up so do people’s tempers, and this may lead one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17243"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17246,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17243\/revisions\/17246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}