The Wit’s Guide to Pejoratives

Or, ameliorating goblinrot

Lara Insulted at the Ball, or, Oh Yes He Did, Alexandre-Marie Colin, 1833

Are things getting better or worse? Or to say it in Latin, are we going through a period of amelioration or pejoration? To pejorate something is to make it worse, and thus a pejorative is an expression that makes things worse. So by the law of facile conclusions, if there are fewer pejoratives floating around out there, things can’t be getting worse, right?

“Personally, I like short words and vulgar fractions.”
— Winston Churchill

Many of the words we bandy about as factual descriptors used to be insults. In the book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, Kurt Andersen suggests we’re running out of ways of “talking about suckers falling for hogwash.” No one says balderdash, humbug, claptrap, or hooey any more, and the last guy who used the word malarkey was run out of town. Further, he writes, words that used to be pejorative are now neutral or even positive. Incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic! Where do I sign?

“Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.”
— Eric Bentley

And the cycle of reclaiming formerly disreputable terms has only accelerated! You know how when you even think of yawning, you yawn? Shockingly the same thing has happened with the term “brain rot.” Does the putrification of your thinking organ sound pleasant? With enough rot, it just might! “In recent months I’ve seen more people use the term rot affectionately,”

Haley Nahman

wrote last month in the always insightful

Maybe Baby

. “I love to rot on the weekend or the thing I miss most about my pre-kid life is rotting. Technically I relate, and miss it too.”

“He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.”
— Jean Cocteau

The problem, as I’ve been reiterating in this space for 300 consecutive weeks, is that everyone’s a dumbass and no one’s a dipgoblin. The stats that bear this out are in Colin Morris’s excellent adventure in profane data journalism. The Toronto programmer came up with a list of 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes that “can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds,” jerkface. He then scraped 14 years of Reddit comments and charted the usage of the 4,800 possible compounds. His explanation is fascinating and worth reading, but let me skip right to his quantifiably offensive Matrix of Pejoration:

Warning: Contains rudeness.

“The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can’t ignore it, top it; if you can’t top it, laugh at it; if you can’t laugh at it, it’s probably deserved.”
— Russell Lynes

And so the real Wit’s Guide to Pejoratives can be found in column 9, and it proves what we all can tell just by looking out the window: Plenty of fuckwits, almost no dirtwits. And, while you’re looking, you might just spot the most persistent pejorative, the pedestrian. We should walk, not run, to reclaim this word, or rather to ameliorate it rather than pejorate it. As Tom Hodgkinson writes in How To Be Idle — perhaps due for a reissue under the title How to Rot — “the pedestrian is the highest and most mighty of beings; he walks for pleasure, he observes but does not interfere, he is not in a hurry, he is happy in the company of his own mind, he wanders detached, wise and merry, godlike. He is free.”

“There are two words for everything.”
— E.V. Lucas

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It’s Riposte Card mailing weekend, which means that instead of rotting I’ll be stuffing the beautiful postcard above (plus April’s yet-to-be-revealed artwork) into A4 envelopes to mail out to the 64 of you who send me money for this service. It’s not too late to join the rejoinders!

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“For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.”
― Ambrose Bierce

We’re still working through the Seven Deadly Sins, just as we did the Five Stages of Grief and the Seven Types of Ambiguity. But if all that sounds too heavy, there’s also the option to choose something more ephemeral.

Issue 300 of Get Wit Quick is either a milestone or a millstone, depending on the light. Thanks to Blake for suggesting an issue on waste words like dregs, smut, and dross, which actually didn’t end up being this issue. To quote Groucho Marx, I’ve had a great evening but this wasn’t it. Hey, you know one thing that’s objectively gotten worse? Music listings. You know one man who’s objectively making them better?

Michael Barclay

with

That Night in Toronto

. The mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Is calling it a “breezy read” pejorative? Is asking you to tap the ❤️ below ameliorative?