20 Old-Fashioned Insults That Sound Oddly Polite Today

“Bless your heart” isn’t dead in the South, nor was it ever. It used to carry a double meaning, because Southern politeness made it inappropriate to tell someone they were ugly, dumb, or just unlucky. The way to express that without being rude was to say “bless your heart.” Depending on how you said it, it meant either sincere compassion or a soft condemnation, implying that despite their effort, they failed. That’s true even today.

The term Mugwump comes from the Algonquian word mugquomp, which means “great chief” or “war leader,” terms used by Native Americans in the northeastern U.S. During the 1884 election, which pitted Grover Cleveland against James G. Blaine, Republican Party stalwarts used it to ridicule reformers who abandoned the GOP as sanctimonious fence-sitters. Later, the pun was complete: the Mugwump’s mug was on one side of the fence, its wump on the other.

In 1725, the English poet Henry Carey released a poem ridiculing a competitor in the literary world, Ambrose Philips, who was known for penning sugary poems for rich kids. Carey turned Philips’s first name into baby-speak, Namby-Pamby. The fellow satirist Alexander Pope subsequently adopted the name, and the two permanently etched the phrase into the English language as a label for anything weak, spineless, or sickeningly sentimental.

“Whippersnapper” did not emerge from a Western film. The expression dates to late 17th-century London street slang, where “snippersnapper” was merged with “whipsters,” idle youths who cracked their whips in the street simply to make noise and attract attention. By 1700, it appeared in print for any impertinent upstart who thought too highly of himself. Edgar Allan Poe, the American author, used the term in an 1832 story.

A “milksop” was literally bread that had been soaked in warm milk, a substance so soft it could be eaten by a baby with no teeth or a person confined to their sickbed. Around 1386, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer used it in his book The Canterbury Tales when a wife taunts her husband by comparing his manhood to an infant’s. It remained in use as a put-down for many hundreds of years, and you’ll still find it in novels written over 500 years after that.

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, was one of the most detested politicians of the 15th century, and even his own heraldry mocked him. His badge was a monkey on a leash, which gave rise to the nickname “Jack Napes,” a familiar name for performing monkeys, but political songs soon applied it directly to the duke. When he was murdered at sea in 1450, the nickname became “jackanapes” and remained in the English language as a reference to an arrogant person who dressed above his station.

The insult “poltroon” appeared in English in 1529, borrowed from French and Italian words derived from a word meaning couch or bed. Officers used “poltroni” to describe lazy cowards who would not engage. In the 18th century, a scholar stated that the term was derived from a Latin word for maimed in the thumb. The theory was that Roman citizens avoided archery duties by severing their thumbs. Today, that’s proven to be a fallacy. It really was just a lazy insult.

Back in Tudor England, there was an expression, “snoutband,” which referred to people who would intrude into discussions whether they were welcome or not. It was a portmanteau of the words snout and band. Some people believe that Henry VIII killed off one of his wives because she called him a snoutband. There is no evidence of this. The earliest known reference to the term appears in a dictionary of archaic and provincial words in 1857.

The word “popinjay” entered English in the 1300s via French and Arabic words for parrot. Calling someone a popinjay used to be a compliment, as parrots were rare, expensive imports. But by the 1500s they were common in European markets, and the parrots’ endless screeching and meaningless repetition made the word an insult. A popinjay was a vain, blustering man in fancy dress who talked only nonsense.

In medieval folklore, the moon was blamed for deformed animals being born. In the 1560s, the English began using “mooncalf” to describe someone considered to be foolish or mentally absent from birth, meaning someone the moon failed to get right. Shakespeare used the term in 1611’s “The Tempest.” The drunken butler Stephano calls the monster Caliban a mooncalf.

David Garrick, English actor and playwright, produced a comedy in 1747 that featured “Mr. Fribble,” a fictional character obsessed with ribbons, gossip, and his own fussy appearance. The audiences loved him. His name eventually took on a life of its own, far beyond the context of the play, and within a few years “fribble” became common slang in Britain and America for any weak-willed, trifling individual. It was just one of those stage jokes that somehow stuck as a lasting epithet.

The Scottish writer Tobias Smollett published a grumpy account of his travels in France and Italy in 1766, complaining about virtually everything he encountered. Two years later, Laurence Sterne hit back in his own travel book, introducing a character named “Smellfungus” who complains about every hotel, meal, and view he encounters in Europe. The insult stuck, and smellfungus became a term for a complainer.

The Court Party in 1690s England gave the name “Grumbletonian” to members of the Country Party. This was done by adding what sounds like a Latin ending, similar to Etonian or Oxonian, to the common English word grumble, so that opponents of the government were made to sound like whiny snobs in purple prose. The English lexicographer Francis Grose later defined it in his 1785 slang dictionary as a habitual grumbler against those in power.

In the 19th century, British and North American city-dwellers could dismiss agricultural workers by calling them chawbacons. It’s a combination of chaw (to chew) and bacon (the cheap, salty, preserved meat that farmhands ate). It meant that the thoughts of agricultural laborers were as base and unsubstantial as their diet.

The word pettifogger first appeared in 1570s England and was used as a derogatory term for a deceitful, low-status legal practitioner who secured victories based on minor technicalities. The word is made up of “petty,” meaning small, and “fogger,” which comes from a Dutch/Flemish slang term meaning “cheater, huckster.” There’s also a nod to the Fuggers, a real-life merchant and banking family in Augsburg whose name had become synonymous with shady business practices.

Francis Grose, the English lexicographer, described the afternoon farmer as someone who squanders his opportunities, although the afternoon farmer was never employed as such. The term was first recorded in 1742, then printed in a later edition of Grose’s slang dictionary in 1788. Because everyone in agricultural society had to rise before sunrise, being called an afternoon farmer was no compliment. It meant someone who rose late, worked during the heat of the day, and wasted the most productive hours.

In 1530s England, “hobbledehoy” was used to describe a gawky teenager stuck between being a kid and a man. By 1573, the English farming writer Thomas Tusser had solidified the term, describing the stages of a man’s life as a child, a fool, a hobbledehoy, and a man. It was an insult that focused on their clumsy posture and awkwardness, which, of course, were traits no teenage boy wants to be known for.

Fopdoodle was coined in 1620s England and combined two insults: fop (vain fool) and doodle (a term for a fool or simpleton in use many decades before doodle meant drawing an aimless sketch). The English lexicographer Francis Grose included it in his 1785 dictionary of slang as a fool “double-distilled,” a person of no importance but great silliness, to provoke universal derision.

In ancient times, the Roman author Pliny the Elder passed along an old zoological myth, folklore rather than fact, saying that bear cubs were born as a shapeless blob and the mother had to lick them into shape. But in Elizabethan English it produced the expression “unlicked cub,” used as an insult for a rude, raw young man who has not been brought up properly. William Shakespeare used the phrase in “Henry VI, Part 3” around 1591, and the English lexicographer Francis Grose included it in his own Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

The word “blatherskite” entered English in 1640s Scotland, where it joined “blather,” or babble, and “skate” or “skite,” an archaic Scots term for a worthless person. It made its way into popular parlance thanks to a Scottish song written circa 1643, and it crossed the Atlantic. In the 19th century, Canadian and US politicians used the word against one another to characterize opponents’ tirades as mere hot air.

This content was created with the help of AI.