From Plonker to Bell-End... the changing language of British Insults!

We have a pretty rich language here in the UK, so rich that we've invented several different put-downs, with varying levels of intensity.

Some recent research has found that many of the older insults are simply not known by the younger generation.....

In a poll of 2000 under 28s, 62% said they had never heard of the term 'lummox' (for a clumsy person), 54% had never heard of anyone referred to as a 'blighter', and a third were ignorant of the term 'toe rag'.

There are several other terms that are at risk of dying out...

In order of how unknown various traditional insults are.....

At least 78% of under 28s still recognise numpty as that's one of my favourites!

Being old I obviously recognise all of the above, except for Bampot, perhaps that is regional...?

It's also interesting to note that some of these are a bit early 20th century... Blighter, cad, scallywag, toe rag sound like they are terms out of the 1940s.

But then I guess what we are seeing from this poll is many of the other terms are all a bit 'mid to late 20th century'.

Language evolves, after all...

I stumbled across this reddit thread... which has Bell End as the clear favourite, and quite a lot of nuanced replies, pointing out that a good insult is all about it being situational and about intonation.

For example saying 'you're welcome' when somebody barges past you or something. Or saying 'thank you' when someone clearly doesn't deserve it.

Also 'you fucking suitcase' is high up, with the comments suggesting calling anyone an inanimate object is good for an insult, but the inflection has to be right...

Bus Wanker from the good old Inbetweeners is up there too...

It all seems that we've gone a bit more postmodern with our insults, today simply adding a swear word in front of anything will do.

Although some specific words are up there - Nonce scores highly, for example. And there's a lot of the above list which still comes up too!

There's also a clear hierarchy of swear words that came out of some 2020 research by OFCOM - Fuck and Cunt are right at the top, so we are not entirely postmodern, there is some consensus around what counts as the most insulting words!

Fascinating!

Final Thoughts

This is inherently sociological, but no way I'd put this on my main blog, Google wouldn't rank it because of all the bad language!

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