INSULTS and INJURY

by Leigh Lundin

In my recent columns, I have been exploring and playing with words. A reader sent me an eMail called When Insults Had Class. I don’t know that the sender intended me to build an article from it, but hey, anything’s fair game.

When I was a little kid, our schoolbus was an hour-long gauntlet, a rolling yellow box populated with mean kids 2, 3, and 4 years older ferried by a bus driver who had more than a little in common with a skeletal Charon.

A fraction of the size of these dudes and coming from a family in which literacy and education was all-important, I stood (or cringed) with the smaller kids and fought back with words.

Once we discovered the thesaurus, we had scintillating conversations like:

“Hey, kid, did you call me stupid?”

“No, I’d never call a such a handsome specimen of cretinism stupid.”

(Already, you’re thinking, “I’d whump such a smartass kid, too!”)

The highbrow insults didn’t stop beatings, but while the bully was knuckling his brow in perplexity, it gave the swiftest of us a chance to escape.

Facts shouldn’t spoil a good story, so the following is only mostly true. Once, when a schoolyard bully flattened me in front of a teacher, the boy justified it by saying I’d called him a girl.

“I didn’t call him a girl,” I said, confused.

“He did too! He keeps calling me Miss Ann Thrope.”

Then the teacher thumped both of us.

• Black eye : 25¢
• Bloody nose : $1
• Look on the kid’s face when the teacher collapsed to her knees laughing: Priceless.

The worst of the local insults went back long before my time, a sophisticated imprecation, considering the rural area. Only in the most extreme cases did one bring down the mother of all insults, calling someone a morphrodite.

I may have to explain that one: whereas a hermaphrodite embodies both sees, a morphrodite contains neither, in other words, sexless. [As an aside, it’s intriguing that so much of our esteem and therefore our most hurtful insults relate to our sexuality Even the etymological meaning of many of our given names refers to being manly or womanly, including Andrew, Charles, Fergie and Ferguson, Carol, Sherry, Letje, Sharon, and Quinby.]

Back then, boys didn’t physically bully girls but ventured verbal insults, slow to realize that the female of the species could tie them in knots, even at that tender age. I remember one tiny little girl staring a bruiser in the eye and saying,

“It seems the baby died but the afterbirth survived.”

Following are some of the smarter exemplars of scorn, starting with one of my favorites:

The word honor in the mouth of Daniel Webster is like the word love in the mouth of a whore.

John Randolph

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.

Clarence Darrow

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Mark Twain

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.

William Faulkner, referring to Ernest Hemingway

I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

Groucho Marx

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

Oscar Wilde

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

Oscar Wilde

I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.

Stephen Bishop

He is a self-made man who worships his creator.

John Bright

I’ve just learned about his illness. Let us hope it’s nothing trivial.

Irvin S. Cobb

He had delusions of adequacy.

Walter Kerr

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.

Mae West, possibly referring to W.C.Fields

He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.

Paul Keating

He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.

Samuel Johnson

And finally, a couple of famous exchanges with Winston Churchill:

George Bernard Shaw:

“I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play. Bring a friend, if you have one.”

Churchill’s response:

“Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one.”

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Lady Astor:

“Winston, if you were my husband, I would poison your coffee!”

Churchill’s reply:

“Madam if I were your husband I would drink it.”

Retrospect

I left the aforementioned school to attend another, just when the most rotten of its older kids were graduating to vocational courses in auto theft and pharmacology for fun and profit.

When I was a freshman in college, I stopped in the town to buy gasoline, and found one of the worst of the bullies had become a pump jockey, immediately arousing angst and anger. But, I took a second look: The boy must have stopped growing in high school, because I now stood a good six inches taller and weighed thirty pounds more. He had grown up (so to speak) to become a shrimp! I imagined him henpecked and having daughters who’d bully him.

Briefly, I fantasized about whipping HIS ass, but, he’d probably have called me a cretin.