New and Updated Invectives

New? It’s older than dirt.

While it is indeed disconcerting to find that a senior Marine Corps officer has been or is being dragged into the corner by his left ear for the alleged use of a word that means ‘a bundle of wooden sticks’, and is also the name for a Welsh pork sausage dish, there should be and is a remedy for such mistakes, especially when, to the majority of us, what he is reported to have said seems rather minor.

Normally, expletives are reserved for moments of stress, extreme stress, and/or a need for mind-blowing, explosively hyperbolic vocables. Vituperatives are not associated with giving advice unless one is at a sports event, being held up at gun point, or chasing ants and stray squirrels away from a picnic table full of food.

It is, therefore, perhaps time that this issue was properly addressed. There are, of course, substitutes for terms that are currently considered to be offensive to people whose lives revolve around getting attention for their sex lives instead of their ability to do the job they were hired to do. And it’s not particularly difficult to insult someone so creatively that he doesn’t realize he’s been insulted for at least 24 hours, or someone tells him so.

Insults have a long and gloried history, going quite far back to Days of Yore, and even further back to The Olden Times. The Romans were notoriously bawdy and made no bones about it. “Futue te ipsum” means exactly the same thing in Latin that it means in English. One should use it sparingly to keep it effective. “Was die Bümsen?” in German means exactly the same that it means in English.

You could, if you so desire, take a class in learning all the possible curses and insults in all languages available, but if you have to write them down for a deaf person, it might lose its effectiveness.

I can’t imagine anyone overreacting to being advised to not do anything ‘too lily-livered’ or ‘milk-quaffing’, can you? How about ‘weedy’? Or ‘wimp-assed’? Or ‘dipstickish’? Or ‘femmish’? You see, there is always a way around those so-called rules that encourage wimpish, pants-pissing codpiece sniffers to complain, when it is obviously much ado about nothing.

The esteemed LtCol Mainz might have been better off in the current counter-culture of hypersensitivity to profane and insulting expletives if he had spent some time perusing the online dictionary of Shakespearean insults. I’m sure that he’d have found a fine substitute for ‘faggot’, something such as ‘flap-eared, flat-brained fishmonger’s offal’, although I do acknowledge that using multiple polysyllabics can take longer than a two-syllable single word.  I would also add that insulting people without their realizing they’ve been insulted, while it is a skill, is easy to learn.

http://www.literarygenius.info/shakespeare-insults-dictionary.htm

I suggest that, for those going into war zones, where the shoot-shoot-bang-bang seems endless, a few lessons in expansion of vocabulary into Shakespearean, Gaelic, and Old Norse cussing would be more beneficial than wasting tax dollars on removing a senior leader whose mistake was the misuse of an old Latin word that was allotted to the front runners at the head of an incoming Legion or Victrix. After all, the Norse were notorious for engaging in bouts of insulting each other before they even began a fight.

I will leave you with this message to those whose sensitivities are enormously overblown, and whose need for attention is more prominent than your fat asses and pert little noses:

Futue te ipsum!

Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lecken!

¡Chingese ustedes!

Iqéishi! Iqéishi buadda!

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves"