Insulting Words for Wordy Wednesday

The Chronicle of Higher Education hosts a blog called "Lingua Franca," dedicated to language and written by a number of professional linguists. As a lover of words, and one who is fascinated by how language works, I read it often.

Lingua Franca's February 4 post by Ben Yagoda, a professor at the University of Delaware, begins with a fairly lengthy analysis of the limited language skills of the current US President compared to previous holders of that office.

Then we get to the good wordy stuff: Yagoda continues with a delightfully colorful discussion of the many and varied words with which the President has been insulted (along with a few other politicians). The post, "Passels of Popinjays," is named in reference to British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson's tweet, "We will not allow US-UK relations to be endangered by some puffed up pompous popinjay in City Hall."

Of course there's also reference to this famous old tweet:

More and more wonderful insulting words follow, for example, the epithet snollygoster, "a word originating in the 19th-century American South and meaning 'a shrewd and unprincipled person, and especially an unprincipled politician.'" I was surprised that Yagoda didn't mention dotard, which was used by North Korea's president, Kim Jong Un last fall, but I guess it's too ordinary a word for this context.

Keep reading, and you'll be treated with this wondrous collection from various sources:

• wazzock
• varlet
• poltroon
• quisling
• fopdoodle
• throttlebottom
• scalliwag
• lickspittle
• blackguard
• mountebank dabbling in laudanum
• ultramaroon
• gulla-bull
• nin-cow-poop

If you want to know more about these words, check the original article or look in the dictionary! Especially note the last three which Yagoda identifies as "from a 1938 Bugs Bunny cartoon."

Word lovers will also be interested in 1000 "new words" added by the Oxford English Dictionary, as summarized in this article in the L.A. Times: "Oxford English Dictionary adds new words for mansplainers and snowflakes alike" That's a lot of words for my Wordy Wednesday -- tomorrow, back to food blogging.