American Insults

As we move into the contemporary period in insult formation in English, we are almost inundated by a cascading torrent of abuse-words. Two things stand out to me, however, about this period: (1) the way insult words are often derived from earlier insult-formations, such as wacko (1977) from wacky (1933) or weirdo (1955) from weirdie (1894) or even jerk-off (1968) from jerk (1935); and (2) the way that insults now morph from terms describing a person's deficient intelligence into words describing craziness, sexual words or excretory-function words. For example, in the earliest period, I argued that the insults of the time, such as blockhead or dunderhead or numbskull, all reflected a knowledge deficiency. However, once we get to our present-day period we have words like dipshit (1963) or kook (1950) or shithead (1961), which make reference to a number of human deficiencies or activities.

I have yet to read a convincing explanation for this. Some people who don't seem to like the modern world simply argue for a general cultural decline, a sort of diminution in civility which is "regrettably" taking over the world. In the minds of these people, everything was just about perfect when Britain was ruling the Seven Seas, Gilbert & Sullivan were composing HMS Pinafore, and Victoria was still on the throne. Yet, I think things are a great deal more complex than that. I would venture to say that our "modern" world has seen an alteration of the concepts of public and private space in such a way that things once thought private have been brought more into the public domain. One of the results of this "Public-ization" of our lives has been the loosening of speech constraints. But this doesn't necessarily point to "decline." For example, the murder rate, probably a more accurate predictor of "cultural decline" has itself declined dramatically in the past 150 years. In fact, we are a far less violent culture, per capita, than we were in the "good old days."

These Essays

The purpose of this and the next few essays is to bring you into the world of modern insults. A few caveats will apply, however. I focus on single-word insults. I also don't claim that this list or history is complete. One of you might take this as your goad really to understand insults as a cultural expression. Therefore, I hope someone "improves" on these essays. Finally, I will occasionally bring in some insults from earlier periods that I may not have touched earlier. One of the things I discovered as this study was unfolding is the way that insult-words sometimes go through three stages before they become in fact an insult. Take the word prick, for example. Over the centuries it morphed from a minute quantity or a physical injury, to a description of the penis, to a word of abuse to describe a person. The word prick in the last sense emerged only in 1929, as the elegant American Speech defined it as "one in authority who is abusive or unjust." Often, however, the word was spelled P...k!, perhaps as a recognition that censors were still out there. Lest we be confused, Partridge's 1937 Dictionary of Slang said that it is an "offensive or contemptuous term (applied to men only)."

Interestingly enough, the word cunt as a term of derogation was also invented in 1929 (I guess when the stock market crashes, we just descend into name-calling). But what is interesting to me is that some early references to cunt actually referred to men. Henry Miller, in his racy 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer could use both terms in one sentence to describe both genders, but you could also have sentences like this, from George Orwell, from the 1930s: "Tell him he's a cunt from me." I think that just as women were "shielded" from witnessing such things as executions well into the 20th century, so authors in general "shielded" women from the harsher derogatory epithets, probably until the most recent period. Now, increasingly, insults are "equal-time" phenomena.

Let me give you a list, with the years of first attestation in parentheses, of fifteen of our modern abuse words. Then, since I have dragged you through the gutter in these words, I will end with a word about three interesting, but not abuse, words from the 1940s-1950s. Here they are: 1. weirdo (1955); 2. kook (1960); 3. doofus (1960); 4. shithead (1961); 5. dipshit (1963); 6. douche-bag (1963); 7. dickhead (1964); 8. klutz (1965); 9. dirt-bag (1967); 10. jerk-off (1968); 11. dweeb (1968); 12. ditzy (1973); 13. dink (1974); 14. wacko (1977); and 15. ditz (1982). I actually think that if you knew this history, and could recite it like preachers recite John 3:16, you would become the life of many, many parties in this world.

Concluding with Three "Tame" Words

Before expositing some of this "list of 15" in the next few essays, I will close with less offensive, but still interesting, terms from the beginning of the "modern" period. Those three words are: square, Daddy-O, and nerd. The term square originated in American jazz in the 1940s. The Baltimore Sun had this to say in a 1944 article. "Square, in musician's jargon, anyone who is not cognizant of the beauties of true jazz." In this regard, a square was someone who was not hip. The word hip in the sense of "informed of" or "with it" (where does that come from? Oops, just found out. The first attestation of "with-it" came in 1962: "Curtain designs for the really "with-it" contemporary home") first appeared in F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920 in a non-musical context. "I'm hipped on Freud and all that." It meant to be informed, to be a contemporary person on, etc. By the late 1930s, hipped to the jive meant to be well-informed on the lastest slang expressions. That the term became argot in the Black community is evident from the 1945 definition of "smart Negro" as "hipped spade." Then, finally, hip and square met in this 1947 quotation: "Are there any squares in this outfit? 'No, man, we're all hipped.'" By the time the 1950s rolled around, then, you just didn't want to be square. You wanted to "be there" and not "be square." Square had morphed from being a word describing deficiency in knowledge of jazz to a general tendency to be "out of it."

Well, I think I am out of space here. Let's continue this.

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