Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Bad language? Jargon, slang, swearing and insult 79
Insults and maledictions
To insult someone verbally is to abuse them by assailing them with contemptuous,
perhaps insolent, language that may include an element of bragging. It
is often directly addressed to the target, as in:
B to A: You asshole, you’re a fucking tight-assed cunt. Get fucked.
Verbal insults can occur in all styles of language. Insults are normally
intended to wound the addressee or bring a third party into disrepute, or both.
They are therefore intrinsically dysphemistic, and so typically tabooed and
subject to censorship. Insults typically pick on and debase a person’s physical
appearance, mental ability, character, behaviour, beliefs and/or familial and
social relations. Thus insults are sourced in the target’s supposed ugliness,
skin colour and/or complexion, over- or undersize (too small, too short, too
tall, too fat, too thin), perceived physical defects (short-sight, squint, big nose,
sagging breasts, small dick, deformed limb), slovenliness, dirtiness, smelliness,
tartiness, stupidity, untruthfulness, unreliability, unpunctuality, incompetence,
incontinence, greediness, meanness, sexual laxness or perversion,
sexual persuasion, violence towards others (even self), ideological or religious
persuasion, social or economic status, and social ineptitude. And additionally,
supposed inadequacies on any of the grounds just listed among the
target’s family, friends and acquaintances. Dysphemistic terms of insult
include all of the following.
Comparisons of people with animals that are conventionally ascribed
certain behaviours, for example, calling someone a bat, cat, fox, vixen,
sow, pig, cow, bitch, cur, dog, mongrel, swine, louse, dove, hawk, coot, galah,
chicken, turkey, mouse, rabbit, bull, ox, goat, ape, monkey, ass/donkey, mule,
rat, snake, etc. Names of female animals can normally be used only in naming
or addressing women and male homosexuals: e.g. a cat is typically a ‘vicious
and/or scratchy woman’, but a pussy is used (mostly in America) to insult a
male for being ‘effeminate, homosexual’ and occasionally a female for
having a ‘weak character’ (it is also slang for a femme ‘lesbian who adopts
the feminine role’); a bitch is a ‘(usually nasty) woman held in contempt’; 56 a
vixen is a ‘cunning, perhaps sneaky, woman’; cow and sow don’t differ much,
generally denotes a ‘woman disliked, who is typically doltish’ – and there are
connotations of being fat, too, cf. the commonly used fat cow/sow. (Silly) old
bat would normally be used of a woman past middle age; bat in this sense
does not occur unmodified. (The predicative bats, e.g. You’re bats, is used of
either sex, and probably derives from the figure have bats in the belfry, i.e. ‘be
mad, nuts’.) Some animal names are typically used of men: mongrel, cur or
swine denotes a ‘vicious, nasty fellow, held in contempt’ (comparable with