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The Intentional Insult

The tragedy of Coriolanus (by Shakespeare, William)
A pair of blue eyes (by Hardy, Thomas)
Alice in Wonderland (by Carroll, Lewis)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom ... (by Twain, Mark)
Importance of Being Earnest, The (by Wilde, Oscar)
The Sun Also Rises (by Hemingway, Ernest)
Pride and Prejudice (by Austen, Jane)
The Rambler : Volume 1 (by Johnson, Samuel)
The Fall of the House of Usher : And Oth... (by Poe, Edgar Allan)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (by Shakespeare, William)
The Tragedy of King Lear (by Shakespeare, William)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (by Doyle, Conan)
Great Expectations (by Dickens, Charles)
Martin Chuzzlewit (by Charles Dickens)
Mr. Dooley's philosophy (by Dunne, Finley Peter)

Oscar Wilde is famed for the quip, “A gentleman is one who is never unintentionally rude.” Or something to that effect. The gist of the sentiment is twofold: 1) A gentleman takes care not to give offense, and 2) if a gentleman does give insult, he does so intentionally. The witty description of a gentleman goes hand-in-hand with the best literary insults in which authors and playwrights skewer others with deliberate intent.

In A Pair of Blue Eyes (1912) by Thomas Hardy, a swain damns his lady’s lack of sexual experience with a backhanded compliment: “You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.” He soothes the sting by saying immediately afterward, “[A]nd I was told once, by my friend Knight, that that is an excellent fault in a woman.”

Mark Twain, always ready with well-aimed insult, didn’t restrain his wit to nonfiction. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer says to his companion in crime, “Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn’t let on.”

No list of literary insults can be complete without references to the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. We get an earful in The Tragedy of King Lear: “Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.” A civilized expression of dislike and the desire to quit someone’s undesired company in As You Like It: “I desire that we be better strangers.” More delightful offense in The Tragedy of Macbeth: “You should be women and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so." And again in The Tragedy of Coriolanus: “The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.”

In Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s debonaire hero Rhett Butler’s famous quote in the movie of the same title to a suddenly repentant Scarlett O’Hara sums up a man who’s had enough of a woman’s fickleness: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Masculine dissatisfaction with women finds more than adequate expression in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe: “Thou wretch! - thou vixen! - thou shrew!" said I to my wife on the morning after our wedding, "Thou witch! - thou hag! - thou whipper-snapper! - thou sink of iniquity - thou fiery-faced quintessence of all that is abominable! - thou - thou-"

J. D. Salinger’s modern classic The Catcher in the Rye offers some homespun wisdom couched in vitriol: “I told him he didn’t even care if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn’t care was because he was a goddam stupid moron. He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”

Samuel Johnson also insulted his contemporaries in general with this damning statement in The Rambler: “Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend."

Roald Dahl shows readers that insults need not be restricted to adult literature in Matilda: “You blithering idiot! … You festering gumboil! You fleabitten fungus! … You bursting blister! You moth-eaten maggot!”

Lewis Carroll mixes polite calumny with a lesson in manners in Alice in Wonderland when the Mad Hatter tells Alice, “Your hair wants cutting.”

Charles Dickens exercises exquisite Victorian manners in this insult from Martin Chuzzlewit: “He would make a lovely corpse.” He also damns with faint praise in Great Expectations: “Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself."

In a dystopian novel by Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, we get another volley of creative name-calling and incomprehensible slang: “Well, well, well, well. If it isn’t fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.”

Strong allusion to the lack of one’s mental capacity hits hard in Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut: “If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.” Finley Peter Dunne also stabs with a sharp insult to intelligence in Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy: “Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classed as cannibals."

Political writer George Orwell expresses the worthlessness of a character in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”: “He is simply a hole in the air.” John Fowles says much the same thing in The Collector: “He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human.”

Jane Austen’s spirited Elizabeth Bennett demonstrates that women can skillfully sling insults, too, in Pride and Prejudice: “You are the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.”

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wields wit and brevity with laser-edged sharpness: “I misjudged you… You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.”

Sherlock Holmes chastises with his usual economy of expression in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “A Scandal in Bohemia” in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: “You see, but you do not observe.”

Raymond Chandler uses concise and simple words to deliver a hefty one-two punch in The Long Goodbye: “You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.”

Albert Camus, the master of absurdity, expresses indecision with decisive wit in A Happy Death: "I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.”

This article begins with Oscar Wilde and ends with his wit from The Importance of Being Earnest: “I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.”

Civilized, intelligent people need no profanity to deliver a razor sharp insult.

By Karen M. Smith