The Art of the Insult

It’s a new year, and, at some point during it, inevitably, you’ll want to insult someone. Hurling an insult feels so good; it’s such an explosion of catharsis, such a rapturous rupture of annoyingly ossified social discourse, such a tuft of crabgrass in the Zen garden of civility, such a tasering stimulation of the brain’s reward pathways—and, besides, the recipients just deserve it. This year, though, let’s resolve to elevate our insults, give them some class and sophistication, for classy, sophisticated insults double the cortical arousal: they leave the insultee nonplussedly silent as well as listeringly binsulted. So, to that end, I offer the following selection of insults from that capo di capi of insultitude, William Shakespeare.
• Is his head worth a hat?
• A knot you are of damned bloodsuckers
• A fusty nut with no kernel
• A man who is the abstract of all faults that all men follow
• I desire that we be better strangers
• A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog
• Go thou and fill another room in hell
• Thine face is not worth sunburning
• Priests must become mockers, if they shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you
• God grant we never have need of you
• Thy mother’s name is ominous to all children
• He has not so much brain as ear-wax
• He speaks nothing but madman
• Foul indigested lump
• Let vultures gripe they guts
• If you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt
• Leave they vain bibble-babble
• Idol of idiot-worshippers
• I’ll carbonade your shanks
• I throw thy name against the bruising rocks
• Thou full dish of fool
• I think thou art an ass
• Were I like thee, I would throw away myself.
• Owner of no one good quality
• You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!
• Methink’st thou art a general offense and every man should beat thee
• That bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies
• There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune
• Thou art unfit for any place but hell
• Thou are pigeon-livered and lack gall
• A most pathetical nit
• You are as a candle, the better burnt out

It’s fun to make up your own using Shakespeare as a model. Here’s a few I’ve created and intend to use this year, in meetings most likely:
• That vial of bubonic mediocrity
• Cease thou thy wince-inducing quantum of ego-addled prattle
• Thy wit is as a chassis onto which nonsense is welded
• Take hence thy puckering astringent ineptitude
• Conscience-deprived credit default swapper
• Oh arrant blunderer, thou speak’st solecistic ignorance
• I find thy thinking of like clarity with the stochastic gradient decline
• Oh unlanced boil; oh zettabyte of intractability, oh sneering dunderheadery
• Has’t not yet recovered from thy intellectual narcolepsy?
• Get thee to the remainder bin, thou tumescent plaything of conformity
• There is no more substance in thee than in a bucket of Karmelkorn
• Save me from thy towering bushwa; feed me not thy intellectual gruel

Weaponed with a Shakespearean insult, you will, in any verbal cage match, send your opponent to an ignominious smackdown. However, full disclosure requires that I include a word of warning. Recall Montressor’s opening sentence in Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado:” “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.” And what a revenge! Montressor bricked and mortared up the unfortunate Fortunato, alive, in a small catacomb recess. Perhaps Fortunato failed to make his insult sufficiently Shakespearean. In any event, exercise some caution: make sure that your insultee is not, like Montressor, “a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple rotten at the heart,” that he is not “deep, hollow, treacherous and full of guile,” and that he is not “a huge translation of hypocrisy, vilely compiled.”