AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
More than a few feathers have been ruffled recently by name calling. First it was Micheal Martin who called Mary Lou McDonald a liar – he says he didn’t, the word he used meant untruth. Then Donald Trump, in an unprecedented diatribe, called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalensky a dictator.
While Trump’s remarks, in which he questioned the Ukrainian leader’s legitimacy and said that “he should never have started the war” – where in reality Russia was the aggressor – were an outright calumny, the Taoiseach’s remark had a mischievous element. Would anyone in the Dail, where Irish is not as fluent as might be imagined, spot what he had said and, anyway, would they know the true meaning of the word used?
These words were insults certainly, designed to provoke and defined as a disrespectful or a scornfully abusive remark or act. They were unstatesmanlike and of a kind likely to demand an apology. But the remarks will hardly go down on record as examples of the art of the insult. A finely tuned insult is memorable and humorous and likely to provoke laughter at the expense of the injured party.
Those known for their wit can be relied upon to come up with a finely wrought insult and it’s hard to beat Dorothy Parker. Her quip about Katherine Hepburn’s performance in a Broadway play – “She ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B” – was a classic putdown. Or how about her off-the-cuff remark on being told that President Coolidge was dead – “How can they tell?”
British politicians sometimes come up with good insults too – maybe all those boring hours on the benches in Westminster give them time to think. One I especially like – it conjures up such a vivid image – was feisty Labour MP Dennis Healey on being attacked by Conservative Geoffrey Howe, “like being savaged by a dead sheep”.
Winston Churchill wasn’t behind the door when it came to rude replies. On being accused of being disgustingly drunk by MP Bessie Braddock, said: “In the morning Madam, I shall be sober but you will still be disgustingly ugly.”
It’s the ability to come up with an off-the-cuff putdown which inspires envy, like Tullulah Bankenhead’s throw-away line to an admirer: “I’ll come and make love to you at 5 o’clock but if I’m late do start without me.”
How often does it happen that you fail to come up with a witty last word in an argument, only to think of one hours later. Pope John XXIII came up with a good one in response to the question: “How many people work in the Vatican”, when he said: “About half.”
Maybe the art of good one-liners has faded with time, for who can beat wisecracking Mae West in 1933 with: “When women go wrong men go right after them.”
One liners – not necessarily insults but especially risqué ones about sex – can really boost the reputation of a movie. “Hey don’t knock masturbation, it’s sex with someone I love,” said Woody Allen in Annie Hall. Or an editor, when Tim Pat Coogan described the rulings of the Catholic Church on matters of sexual morality, said: “It’s rather like teaching swimming from a book without ever having got wet oneself.”
The advantage of written barbs is that there is more time to come up with something witty, like Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” or his description of a foxhunting Englishman as “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
Among the insulting words not to be used in the Dail apparently, are guttersnipe, communist and yahoo. Maybe Micheal Martin was right though, not in what he said, but in his use of Irish. I am not an Irish speaker and I am indebted to Manchan Magan, for the knowledge that Irish is particularly rich in rude or insulting words; there are apparently 20 words for a lazy person and a dozen for lout, but these are used in a friendly way.
In a country known for its wit and repartee, there don’t surprisingly seem to be many recorded examples of memorable insults but maybe that’s because given our fondness of everyday craic we haven’t lost the art of the insult.
