13 Amazing Insults You Must Know!
https://wp.me/p84YjG-ap5
#insults #roast #zsoltzsemba

https://zsoltzsemba.com/13-amazing-insults-you-must-know/

13 Amazing Insults You Must Know!

I saw this and had to share it.

There is a specific kind of insult that does not shout. It waits. You hear it, nod along, and then three thoughts later it lands. That delayed impact is the point. It does not rely on volume, profanity, or aggression. It relies on precision.

These are the kinds of lines that expose bad thinking without arguing with it. They do not try to win. They simply step aside and let reality do the work.

Here are some of my favourites, exactly because they sound polite at first pass.

• I admire how you never let evidence interfere with your opinions.

This one works because it does not accuse. It complements the commitment while quietly pointing out the flaw.

• You have a unique way of contributing without adding much.

It acknowledges effort while questioning value. That contrast does the damage.

• I can see why that makes sense to you.

Short. Calm. Devastating. It ends the conversation without escalating it.

• You’re clearly intelligent. It just doesn’t show up where it matters.

This hits because it separates raw intelligence from applied judgment.

• You have a rare talent for speaking at length without disturbing the facts.

No yelling. No denial. Just an observation.

• When it comes to thinking, you travel light.

Economical. Clean. Nothing wasted.

• I love how you think outside the box. It’s clear no one ever invited you inside one.

This one takes a second. Then it stings.

• You have a special way of speaking that makes people appreciate your silence.

It reframes the problem as a public service.

• You’re not wrong. You’re just operating in a different intellectual time zone.

It sounds generous until you realize what it implies.

• Intelligence seeks you, but you appear to be a master at hiding.

This one works because it never claims superiority. It just notes avoidance.

• Light travels faster than sound. That’s why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Physics does the heavy lifting here.

• I could explain it to you, but I left my crayons at home.

It suggests the gap without spelling it out.

• It’s truly remarkable that you were the strongest swimmer your father had.

This one lands last. And hard.

The common thread here is restraint. None of these insults rush. They do not try to dominate the room. They let the listener connect the dots on their own.

That is why they linger.

just for the clarification, when i call someone and idiot, low IQ, demented, clinical insane, utterly crazy, absolute moron - then this is not referencing any disabilities. people with disabilities usually get what is at stake for them.

i mean people that, since COVID or so, would drink a glass of hydrofluric acid if karen on facebook told them it cures pimpels and which are solely responsible for the state of the world.

#insults #ableism

Ijit, idjit, eejit, idiot

After reading a lot of Stephen King in my teens and early 20s, I went about 15 years not reading him at all. Then I came across Dolores Claiborne in a local bookshop and immediately bumped it to the upper reaches of my book mountain. I’ve long admired the film adaptation, so I was more than a little curious to visit the source.

Set on an island off the coast of Maine, New England, it’s a memorable story told very well as a continuous narrative in Dolores’s dialectal speech. It has one lexical feature that I want to mention here. No spoilers follow:

…the biggest ijit in the world coulda told he didn’t think I’d do any such thing once I finally understood what’d happened

I don’t remember seeing the word ijit in print before. Obviously it’s a regional form of idiot – like idjit, another variant – and means more or less the same thing (see eejit, below), but it’s interesting how its pronunciation /’ɪdʒət/ ‘idget’ differs from the standard /’ɪdiət/ ‘iddy-uht’. I suppose this is related to the tendency for /dj/ to shift to /dʒ/ in words like due and during.

Ijit has only one hit in COCA; idjit has three, including the amusing line ‘an optimist […] is just a crossword puzzle way of saying idjit’. Browsing Google Books, though, I see that they’re not so rare, ijit occurring for instance in a story by Jacques Futrelle, who lived not far from Maine in Scituate, Massachusetts.

I expect they occur here and there around the English-speaking world. Wordnik aggregates several colloquial examples of both forms. Rooting around some more, I see that ijit is also an old African American word, mentioned in Hubert Anthony Shands’s Some Peculiarities of Speech in Mississippi (1893):

Eejit is the Irish English equivalent, and is common in fictional and vernacular dialogue. It doesn’t connote intellectual difficulty – idiot can – instead signalling foolish behaviour, be it chronic or occasional. Eejit is softer than idiot, and is not generally used hurtfully but to gently criticise someone the speaker knows and may well hold in affection. I imagine this is also true of ijit and idjit, but I’m open to correction.

Eejit can, of course, be used in self-criticism, as in this example from Jennifer Johnston’s novel Shadows on Our Skin:

And he hadn’t done his homework, let alone his extra homework. Eejit. Eejit.

T. P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers a few literary examples of eejit and a note on pronunciation: that it approximates the Irish rendering of d and i. Take for example the Irish words Dia (God) /’dʲi:æ/ and idir (between) /’ɪdʲər/. [Edit: See the comments for more on this.]

‘You’re the biggest eejit this side of Cork,’ his old father used to say snappishly. (William Trevor, Fools of Fortune)

Common modifiers of eejit include big, awful, feckin’, fuckin’, and oul’ (also ould, aul’, auld). Its jocular flavour made it a frequent favourite in the TV comedy Father Ted, and might help explain why the word was found to be not unparliamentary when it was used in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Irish English as Represented in Film by Shane Walshe presents some uses of the word in films, but you’ll have to turn your head sideways to read them. Like an eejit.

#books #dialects #DoloresClaiborne #HibernoEnglish #insults #IrishEnglish #language #phonetics #pronunciation #slang #speech #spelling #StephenKing #usage #words

Hmmm.... Could this become my favorite bot in the Fediverse?

@shakespearean_Insults

#Shakespeare #Literature #Insults

Ellisland, 1791

Dear Sir:

Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed; thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice…

—Robert Burns, Letter to a critic
via @lettersofnote

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/thou-pickle-herring-in-the-puppet

#Scottish #literature #RobertBurns #BurnsNight #18thcentury #LettersofNote #correspondence #letters #critics #insults