Posted in

New and Updated Invectives

by Ex-PH2••33

New? It’s older than dirt.

While it is indeed disconcerting to find that a senior Marine Corps officer has been or is being dragged into the corner by his left ear for the alleged use of a word that means ‘a bundle of wooden sticks’, and is also the name for a Welsh pork sausage dish, there should be and is a remedy for such mistakes, especially when, to the majority of us, what he is reported to have said seems rather minor.

Normally, expletives are reserved for moments of stress, extreme stress, and/or a need for mind-blowing, explosively hyperbolic vocables. Vituperatives are not associated with giving advice unless one is at a sports event, being held up at gun point, or chasing ants and stray squirrels away from a picnic table full of food.

It is, therefore, perhaps time that this issue was properly addressed. There are, of course, substitutes for terms that are currently considered to be offensive to people whose lives revolve around getting attention for their sex lives instead of their ability to do the job they were hired to do. And it’s not particularly difficult to insult someone so creatively that he doesn’t realize he’s been insulted for at least 24 hours, or someone tells him so.

Insults have a long and gloried history, going quite far back to Days of Yore, and even further back to The Olden Times. The Romans were notoriously bawdy and made no bones about it. “Futue te ipsum” means exactly the same thing in Latin that it means in English. One should use it sparingly to keep it effective. “Was die Bümsen?” in German means exactly the same that it means in English.

You could, if you so desire, take a class in learning all the possible curses and insults in all languages available, but if you have to write them down for a deaf person, it might lose its effectiveness.

I can’t imagine anyone overreacting to being advised to not do anything ‘too lily-livered’ or ‘milk-quaffing’, can you? How about ‘weedy’? Or ‘wimp-assed’? Or ‘dipstickish’? Or ‘femmish’? You see, there is always a way around those so-called rules that encourage wimpish, pants-pissing codpiece sniffers to complain, when it is obviously much ado about nothing.

The esteemed LtCol Mainz might have been better off in the current counter-culture of hypersensitivity to profane and insulting expletives if he had spent some time perusing the online dictionary of Shakespearean insults. I’m sure that he’d have found a fine substitute for ‘faggot’, something such as ‘flap-eared, flat-brained fishmonger’s offal’, although I do acknowledge that using multiple polysyllabics can take longer than a two-syllable single word.  I would also add that insulting people without their realizing they’ve been insulted, while it is a skill, is easy to learn.

http://www.literarygenius.info/shakespeare-insults-dictionary.htm

I suggest that, for those going into war zones, where the shoot-shoot-bang-bang seems endless, a few lessons in expansion of vocabulary into Shakespearean, Gaelic, and Old Norse cussing would be more beneficial than wasting tax dollars on removing a senior leader whose mistake was the misuse of an old Latin word that was allotted to the front runners at the head of an incoming Legion or Victrix. After all, the Norse were notorious for engaging in bouts of insulting each other before they even began a fight.

I will leave you with this message to those whose sensitivities are enormously overblown, and whose need for attention is more prominent than your fat asses and pert little noses:

Futue te ipsum!

Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lecken!

¡Chingese ustedes!

Iqéishi! Iqéishi buadda!

You might also like

A Pregnant Pause For Your Amusement and Edification

Democrats Gun for Trump Impeachment Part II

Ft. Bragg barracks update

33 thoughts on “New and Updated Invectives”

  1. Best one I can think of is kutombo wewe (hat tip to API). It’s Swahili for . . . well, Google is your friend. (smile)

  3. It seems the 6th Marine Regiment has seen a number of officers in recent years reprimanded or relieved for similar articulations or under different circumstances. I served in Wpns Co 3/6 in the late 1980s under Col. James Livingston.
    My company commander was Charles M.Garganus.

      1. Back then it was the 26 MAU(SOC) which became the 26 MEU. Before all the PC and other crap. Marines are faced with enough daily internal crap and adding more restrictions on speech is just another blow to morale.

        1. Perhaps some instruction on the art of creative curses and expanded vocabulary would displace those restrictions.

      2. I met General Livingston at a Legion of Valor reunion in Fresno in 1994. We toured the Legion’s museum there together.

        (let me hasten to add, I get to go to those on account of my Dad’s posthumous MoH. The only other way I could get in might be as the janitor.)

  5. In Yiddish, “A maidel mit a vayndel” (a pony-tailed cutie-pie). That might make someone I can think of happy.

  6. I think I’m in love with you, Ex-PH2. Anyone with that much command of language is my heroine. Makes me want to take up (again) the study of languages. I did take Latin in HS, but it’s mostly forgotten now.

        1. Okay, I’m in, too. Does that mean that everybody here has a crush on EX?
          And, Ex-PH2, when you went to boot camp, did they count cadence to the Jody stuff, and sing about how cold an Eskimo’s p**** is?

          1. No, the WAVES POs were much more polite than that. Anyone who couldn’t figure out left foot from right foot went right up front and learned which was which very quickly.

            Rather loosey-goosey compared with what youse guys had to put up with.

            I’m sure it’s quite different now.

            1. Sorry, may’ve hit “report comment” by accident. Luckily, I didn’t have to do boot camp, as that’s for swabbies and jarheads. I think for chair force there’s something like pre-school, isn’t there? Did Army basic training at Ft. Lewis, with a couple of delightful chaps as DIs. Sgt. Davis tried really hard to be scary but he couldn’t keep himself from laughin’ sometimes. Now, Sgt. Reynolds was another story. I think I only saw him smile 3-4 times, other than when he was torturin’ a recruit. Scary thing was that even smilin’ in spite of himself, he looked so bad-ass that it was like he was back in the ‘hood and about to kick the asses of all the punks how’d given him a bad time growin’ up. I seem to remember him havin’ a CIB but not what his unit had been. Those boys sure put together some creative cursin’, I’ll tell you.

  8. By the way, Wilmer, the gunsel in “The Maltese Falcon” grew up to be …..

    Francis ‘Ice Pick’ Hofstetler in “Magnum PI”
    http://www.aveleyman.com/Gallery/2017/C/tve3554-208-19861210-2.jpg

    gunsel (plural gunsels)

    A young man kept for homosexual purposes; a catamite.

    QUOTE: The boy’s eyes […] ran over Spade’s body from shoulders to knees, […] ¶ “Another thing,” Spade repeated, glaring at the boy: “Keep that gunsel away from me while you’re making up your mind. I’ll kill him. […] ”

    (street and prison slang) A passive partner in anal intercourse.

    Etymology 2
    By misunderstanding of the 1929 Maltese Falcon quotation above (which survived in a popular 1941 film adaptation). The novel was originally serialized in a magazine…whose editor refused to allow vulgarities. Hammett used the word gunsel knowing that the editor would likely misunderstand it as relating to gun, and therefore allow it.

    1. Mr. Hammet sure fooled me. I always thought a gunsel was slang and meant the same thing as gun moll.

      1. And -that- is an -epic- example of the craft of the Writer, and probably one of the top-ten all-time dickovers of an Editor.

        For that alone, he should be Legendary.

    2. “Gunsel” Heh. That’s choice, really choice. Had me fooled too, thought it meant a hired gun. Just as Mr. Hammett intended.

  11. Not to be confused with radio code for CTC Intel positions, how about Number 9 Man? We did training with several Majority Muslim Armies back in the day and all either obviously had one or it was talked about like they had them. I was even approached when we were training the Tunisians if we wanted to swap “Number 9 Man”, I had a Soldier who was small and looked a little effeminate in my Squad. I laughed and then made sure my Team leaders knew not to let him be alone with any of them as we might end up with an incident (he had a bit of a Napoleon Complex).

Comments are closed.