Away, slight man

It was a moment of inattention on my part which would have caused a small biff if the other driver had not braked with commendable speed of reaction.

He wound his window down. ‘You silly so-and-so!’, he snarled (I paraphrase). Now, I thought, he will call me a such-and-such. Sure enough, ‘You stupid such-and-such!’, he added.

How sad that made me feel, as I gave him a friendly wave and drove on! Here was this poor fellow, heir to the language of Shakespeare and Milton, with every reason to engage in a thersitical exchange of views, and all that came to him in his hour of need were these tired old epithets, predictable, banal and with no power to make me feel ashamed or wounded or even insulted.

It isn’t that we lack the words, just that we seem to have forgotten how to use them. Playwrights in earlier centuries could fill up a whole scene just with two chaps being rude to each other, and a collection of Shakespeare’s insults (1992, Mainsail Press, Cambridge, and there are others) has 380 pages of them without even including my favourite: “The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!”.

But such imprecations, though they still have a ring to them and a very clear meaning, are not really suitable for use today. What we need is a little booklet, costing, say, 95p, listing a few hundred telling remarks guaranteed to let your adversary know that he is being powerfully got at in some way, though perhaps not feeling absolutely sure just how.

I have it in mind to compose such a booklet; if any of my friends refuses to buy a copy I shall publicly denounce him as a porriginous old pilgarlic, and he can have that one for nothing.

None of the insults will be more than half a dozen words long, for brevity and simplicity are all in this context. Dr Johnson, who probably knew more words than anyone else living at that time, was once asked a very long and pointless question. He gave the perfect response: ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘you are a fool’.