Unremitting Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira SpecGram Vol CLXVII, No 4 Contents Compound Nouns for Frances—Found among the papers of Russell Hoban by Keith Slater—Illustrated by Kean Kaufmann

Linguistic Insults for Every Occasion

Snidely von Särcäästïcüt and Yo Ma-Ma
X. Quizzit Korps Center for Advanced Collaborative Studies

It is a generally accepted fact that the field of linguistics is known to suffer a bit of physics envy from time to time. However, linguistics should never come second to physics in matters of language. That is why we have taken it upon ourselves to provide our fellow linguists with the material they need to make sure such a fate never befalls them.

In particular, we are referring to the sociologically important area of insults. Take, for example, this excellent physics one-liner:

We can’t have linguists and physicists running into each other in hotel lobbies at conferences or in staff cafeterias at university with the linguists wholly unprepared to respond in kind should the need present itself. We’re not going to win their respect tossing around equations; our best shot is to garner some modicum of respect with and for our verbal skills.

To that end, our crack research teamincluding ourselves as well as several dozen unnamed and uncredited sociolinguistics grad students with field experiencehas collected the following corpus of natural examples of winning insults. Each of these bon mots elicited “oohs” and “aahs” from bystanders, and left their targets red-faced and defeated. Use with care.

Never again need linguistics tolerate the bullying of the “cool kids” from the hard sciences! No more purple nurples, atomic wedgies, or questioning the legitimacy of our field for us!

Unremitting Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t KnowMadalena Cruz-Ferreira
Compound Nouns for FrancesFound among the papers of Russell Hoban by Keith SlaterIllustrated by Kean Kaufmann
SpecGram Vol CLXVII, No 4 Contents