Helmet

Of course hurling insults at others is not great but it feels great. What’s more, there’s no need to use swearwords, as an amazing feature of the English language is that almost any noun can be used as an insult. This creates a new problem though. Which noun should the discerning would-be insulter choose? Well, let’s have a look at how insults work.

Analysis

Weapon

First of all, it’s important to recognise that the verbatim meaning of the insult is of secondary importance: what really matters is intonation. An insult should be a word of quick exhalation, no more than two syllables. It should express both disdain and disgust, both of which must manifest themselves in the facial expression. To achieve this, the utterance will have to be separated into several distinct phases, the interplay of which should yield a word with all the desirable properties.

Phases

Plank

The first phase is the build-up and explosion phase. This is the key step in the dynamics of the insult for several reasons: it draws and focuses attention to the speaker, it should deliver the element of disdain and it also gives the insult its energy. The rest of the insult must roll off the tongue using the air compressed during this phase and running out of breath before the end is just as undesirable as having plenty of breath left. This phase therefore calls for a stop consonant, bilabial plosives ([p], [b]) work best, as they are reminiscent of (and occasionally include actual) spitting.

Muppet,
a poor choice

The second phase is the evacuation phase. This phase consists of a mixture of vowels and consonants. Since almost all the air must be expelled here, the consonants should be approximants or fricatives, allowing relatively free airflow. Unrounded vowels can also improve the effectiveness of the insult by clenching the face into a snarl-like grimace.

In the third and final phase there’s not much air left to work with, but it should be enough for one final flourish. Although it is possible to simply leave out this phase and end with a vowel or semi-vowel, a velar stop helps giving a nice impression of retching.

Conclusion

Prick,
almost perfect

There can be alternative ways of forming effective insults (cf. “fucker”), either by reordering these steps or using radically different strategies, nevertheless this method covers all the objectives set for an effective insult that doesn’t involve literal swearing.

Using the method outlined above we can also construct the perfect insult: PING!

And while this doesn’t seem to be a problem for physicists, even though Einstein’s theories of relativity contain far more counter-intuitive elements than Darwin could ever dream of, it’s one of the “weak points” creationists love to latch onto.

Not only that, it’s hard to be taken seriously in general by the public if your area is “only” a theory. And if you think it can’t get any worse, spare a thought for those brave people who devote their lives researching game theory.

But there’s a tiny voice in my head that says his early life would’ve been much happier, had he not been given the middle name Crapo. Pronounced kray-poe of course, but try telling that to your classmates.

Maybe this painful experience was the reason he dropped out of school and maybe the urge to escape from the stranglehold of that extremely cheap pun was what drove him to success in business, finally allowing him to buy Frigidaire.

Because nobody will be bothered joking with your name when you’re the world’s first fridge magnate.

His first encounter with the magical kingdom of law came early in his childhood when he was accused of indecent exposure by a photographer, who turned out to be of ill repute and such an unreliable witness that he himself was fined for contempt of court. Upon seeing this glorious triumph of Truth at the altar of Justitia he fell to his knees and would still be kneeling there, had the usher not yelled “Kortreiß!” (local dialect for court rise) in his left ear.

He rose then, and continued rising throughout adolescence and here he is now, in front of our very eyes, the burden of responsibility heavy on his shoulders, for by and with the advice of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal he became a cleaner at the Privy Council.

‘Most Honourable they may be’, he grumbled, ‘but not one of them knows how to correctly dispose of food packaging. No-one should be allowed to rise to such high office without knowing the basic rules of snacking in public.’

‘Eduskunnan päätöksen mukaisesti säädetään’, replied his assistant, who liked to be cheeky but wasn’t brave enough to do it in a language anyone in the room can understand.

‘Right, that’s enough for me today’, said Kleinbach, ‘I’m off to the doctor, my memory foam mattress has amnesia.’

And so he went.

After staring blankly into space for a few seconds, a new thought struck me.

Does the Queen have a Facebook account? ‘Ah, this must be the replacement bus service,’ said the internal head of ISO9000 of my brain.

If she does, surely she doesn’t update her status herself or comment on others’ posts. That’s the sort of stuff usually done by courtiers. Have they created a new role for this? Hmmm. Or they could’ve just recycled an old one. For example, with the advent of modern plumbing and the mass production of toilet paper, Groom of the Stool has largely lost its original function. They could just rename it Groom of the Tools and there you go. He’s probably clicking away busily as I’m writing this.

Your majesty and 3 others are amused.

I mean, take airliners, on which there’s no row thirteen. What kind of accident is that supposed to prevent?

‘I’m sorry but we’ve lost row thirteen, it…it just fell out of the middle of the fuselage. Oh, the rest of the plane landed fine, still what a terrible loss.’

Imagine trying to explain the whole phenomenon to an alien who’d just landed on our planet.

‘You see, this is the way we number our houses: we assign odd numbers to one side of the street and evens to the other, and we use base ten notation. So for example if this is number ten here, the house opposite would be number eleven, next to number elven would be number fifteen because, well, because many people are afraid of the number thirteen.’

Imagine explaining all that, what would someone who had crossed millions of parsecs of deep space to visit your planet say?

It’d say: ‘Exactly which part of the sentence “Please take me to your leader” are you failing to understand?”‘