Category: anti-humor

You Don’t Critique Another Man’s Meat

RilalyLeave a comment

“I love grilling,” Leonard said. “Absolutely love it. Some people do it, and some just do it, but for some of us, it’s a passion.” 

If someone said this from behind one of those sleek, compact, Three-Burner, Liquid Propane grills that feature porcelain-enameled, cast-iron cooking grates, you’d scream, I’d scream, we’d all scream for red meat. Check that, I probably wouldn’t scream, not anymore. I’ve been beat down, brothers and sisters, by all them grill-at-the-parkers hollering about how salvation is near. I’m here to testify that those Willie “the wunderkind” types who man the grill, and who, by all appearances should be the chef du jour, are false prophets.

You’ll be disappointed too, but you, the patron of the park, the family and/or friend of the chef, keep in mind that you ain’t paid a dime for that meat, the seat, or anything in between. You are to be grateful, always grateful, when someone hands you a plate, telling you to “Dig in!” on what you’ve been smelling and salivating over for the past ten minutes. You go grateful and stay grateful, because they paid for that meat, and they’ve been slaving over the fire, and you ain’t paid a dime. 

It’s that smelling that gets us, and it leads us astray, my friends. I’ve been there, you’ve been there. We believed in that smell, and our expectations went sky high. We tried to listen to Niece Maggie talking about her volleyball matches, but we don’t hear her, because of the symphony of sizzles going on behind our back.

When the moment of truth arrives, and I mean that in the most literal sense, we don’t even notice the au gratin potatoes when our plate hits that table. All we see is meat, all we hear is sizzling, and if the Promised Land smells anything like this, we might not mind going there a little sooner than expected. Then we get a taste, our first taste, finally, after all that waiting, and our sky-high expectations hit a gut-destroying, roller coaster dip.

“Is it just me or is this … bad?” we ask ourselves, and we’re all asking ourselves that question. You can see it at the table, especially on Cousin Teddy’s face. Do you have a Cousin Teddy? He can’t hide it? He has an eyebrow raised, but-I-ain’t-saying-a-word look on his face, but that face is just saying what we’re all thinking. Is the meat that bad, or are we all just that picky, and do we have a right to be picky, seeing as how this was all free? “But I had such sky high expectations. Doesn’t that warrant disappointment?”

“No, here’s what you do,” a friend of the family once informed me. “You shut your trap, and you keep it shut. That’s what you do. You open it long enough to put the food in it, then you close it to chew, and you keep closing it, until you’re headed home, whispering it to your wife on the drive home. You wanna be starting something? No, there’s nothing to be gained, at a family picnic, by critiquing another man’s meat.”

And when we talk about meat, we’re not talking about pork, brothers and sisters, because pork is tough to screw up. You know it, we know it, because we all done it, and we know it takes a whole bunch of stupidity to mess pork up. Brats, and all of the other meats that fall under the wiener umbrella, rarely knock our socks off or sadly disappoint, and we’ve had an absolutely horrible piece of chicken, what once? Twice, maybe twice. Red meat is the all-knowing meat. Red meat exposes a man’s under belly. It tells us who we are, who we really are. It tells us something about our attention to detail, the vulnerabilities of our spatula, and the frailties of our fork. Red meat does not forgive and forget, and it’s all about red meat.

Red meat is the reason we just drove thirty minutes to this park. We love our get-togethers, spending time with friends and family, and all that, but red meat is special. Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters? A soft, juicy hamburger is sublime, but a properly prepared steak is divine. I don’t care where they cut it, steak is the meat.  

I don’t keep a ledger on my disappointments in life, but when it comes to steak, I’ll throw out a whopping 95%. The fellas with the finest forks have disappointed me 95% of the time. The gas-grilled steak is edible, most of the time anyway, but it’s not Oh!-I-gotta-have-it scrumptious. It’s usually about two notches above edible.

I’ve seen them roll the most beautiful, top-of-the-line, stainless steel, propane gas machines into the park, and I’ve seen who’s ready and who ain’t. I’ve heard the grillers-in-the-park talk about those machines and how their top-of-the-lines can distribute heat so evenly across the grate, and how their four stainless steel burners can produce incredible amounts of BTUs that enhance heat retention so all that cooking “is not only more efficient, it’s convenient and quick.” And I know nothing about their world. I know nothing about all the knowledge they’ve attained from their research. But I’ve done my own research. I’ve researched what they generously produced for me with all their time and effort, between my teeth and gums, and I can’t remember eating a gas-grilled piece of red meat that’s earned those blue-ribbons. It’s quick, your propane grills with all their fixings are quick, but blue-ribbon? What are you smoking son?

So, we all giggle when Terrance rolls in with his $89.00 charcoal grill that he says he bought on sale at Walmart. We join in the giggles with the fellas-in-the-park, with a beer in our hands, because we know that they know, because they’ve been grilling for thirty-some-odd-years, so we trust they know their ins and outs. When the unassuming Terrance reveals his charcoal chimney starter, his flipper, his forker, and some tongs, the very, very basic three-tool set, that he purchased with the grill “all for a little over a hundy,” we join their public chiding, their gentle public shining, and we even join in on their private, and less gentle, scorn.

Terrance doesn’t talk the talk or walk the walk, because he don’t know it. He lived in an apartment and worked in an office for most of his life. Terrance is the type who prefers to eat out. He prefers restaurant food, and we all whisper that while he’s cooking, and we do it in the most condescending manner you can imagine. Terrance is the “doesn’t get it, and he probably never will” type of chef, because he started grilling late in life. If we talk about grilling with him, we started the conversation, not him, and we find he’s pretty insecure about his ability to cook a meal for the entire family.

“I let you guys do it for so long, because you love it. You all love doing this far more than I do,” Terrance whispers to me. “But I got a wife, and I got a life, so I decided to what-the-hell it.” So, it was the wife who talked him into grilling for the whole family. She also told him he was pretty good at it.

“But, for the whole family?” he complained.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

We don’t think he’ll be fine. We wonder what she was smoking. I mean, Terrance doesn’t even own an apron that says something funny about the chef on it. He’s so insecure about his abilities that he doesn’t even join the joke Aunt Pat is telling about the time “Terrance couldn’t find the anus on a trout for cleaning.” He doesn’t know what he’s doing behind a grill, so he ain’t got time for her playtime. He needs to concentrate on trying to cook a fairly decent meal for the whole family. He also doesn’t want to make anyone sick, so he keeps plugging his “Walmart temperature gauge thinger-diller” (a term he uses because he can’t remember the word thermometer!) in the meat, and upon grilling, the verbal kind, we find he isn’t “totally sure what’s the difference between a sirloin and a ribeye”.

The “Oh, boy” we give is not kind. “Oh boy, we might need to get someone else to man the grill Helen,” our brother Jerry says about halfway through. “I’m not sure if Terrance is da man,” he adds, and oh boy do we laugh.

That “Oh, boy” consensus quietly turns kind, about twenty seconds after we sink our teeth and gums into Terrance’s finished product. “Oh, boy!” we want to say, but when no one else says a word, we quietly devour this tender and soft piece of meat that quietly changes everything we thought we knew about grilling-red-meat-in-the-park.

A hint of crisp on the outside is expected, but nothing can prepare us for the soft and chewy 145 degrees of medium-cooked insides that informs us how much dopamine the brain can reward a human being for the sense of taste. Everyone has Aunt Phyllis’s green bean casserole on their plate and Aunt Donna’s au gratin potatoes, but no one has touched any of that yet. There is no talk of trout anuses, fishing trips with our recently-deceased Uncle George, or any of the other great times we’ve had at this park over the years. There’s also no talk about how Terrance and his “under a hundy” arsenal just upended thirty years of grilling research the fellas attained with their top-of-the-line materials. We just quietly devour what Terrance made on his “one healthy sneeze and that thing’s going down” piece of junk, Charcoal grill that he purchased, on sale, from Walmart ten years ago.

Now that our course has been corrected on grilling at the park, we love hearing Leonard go on about how he knows his way around a grill, and how it’s all about love and passion for him. He has all of the latest and greatest cooking utensils, coupled with his ‘Kiss the Chef!’ apron. His stainless steel, propane gas grill has a brand name with numbers behind it that Leonard spouts as if it’s a limited model Lamborghini, and the aesthetic design of it is an absolute feast for the eyes. His wife further amplifies whatever Leonard says about himself and his new grill, and you watch him to see if there’s anything you can learn from a bona fide master. Leonard has a wide variety of wood chips, and he “ain’t afraid to use them”, and he “ain’t afraid to season neither.”

“Delicate and measured,” he says. “I know it’s verboten among the smoke whisperers, but if you keep it delicate and measured, seasoning enhances as opposed to overwhelming.”

When we finally sink our teeth and gums into the finished product of Leonard’s decades of fine-tuning, through trial and error and research, we find a truth about his marvel of science and engineering. We didn’t want to find it. That’s the most important note I want to leave you with today. When Leonard started going on about his passion for grilling, we thought we were going to be rolling around in it minutes later. Our only concern was that we would love it so much that we might make noises when we eat, and some of them might not be human noises. 

We didn’t want him to be wrong. We didn’t want him revealed. We wanted a savory slab of steak between our teeth and gums. When Leonard graciously gave us one of his steaks, we were grateful, but we couldn’t help but notice that it produced a flavor so close to steak that it was edible, but compared to Terrance’s amateur production, Leonard’s steak was anything but we we call a tour-de-force.

“It was actually pretty bland,” we whisper to our wives on the ride home. We don’t say this to Leonard, however. We lie to him, as any respectful guest who just ate the product of another’s effort and generosity will. We whisper that Terrance, and his piece of crap $89.00 cooker, “Actually grilled up a better steak.” We whisper that because we don’t want anyone to know what we don’t. 

“I know,” she whispers back, “But shhh!” We’re in the privacy of our own car, and we’re whispering, and she’s shushing me to try to prevent me from carrying on to the point that someone might hear us and know that we don’t know what we’re saying. We don’t know anything. We know so little that we don’t even know what we don’t know, but we know what we know, and we know you don’t critique another man’s meat.   

How The Brady Bunch Damaged Him

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“The thing about being human is,” Bob Peters said to initiate a conversation with my friend Arnold Glass.

“No, I am human,” Arnold said. “I’m standing right before you, two arms, and two legs just like you.” 

That was funny, I thought, examining Arnold’s face for a break that would reveal the joke. It wasn’t award-winning funny, or even knee-slapping funny, but I considered it a fairly decent trap to set for Bob Peters for future jokes. Depending on where he took it from there, I thought he laid some pretty decent groundwork. The three of us were co-workers at a company, on break, shooting the stuff. I didn’t know Bob Peters. He was kind of a floater, who moved from person to person, group to group, but I thought I knew Arnold. We were co-workers who spent so much time around each other that I suppose I could’ve call him a best friend at work, but that just seems like such a grade school/high school designation. It just feels odd to call a grown man that I didn’t know before we started working at the same company a best friend, but we did a lot together over the years. Arnold could be funny occasion, but he was more knock-knock joke funny. This level of dada comedy, or what I thought might be intentionally irrational comedy without a base or direction was so out of character for him that I thought he might follow it up with, ‘Sorry, that just sounded like something to say. It didn’t work as well as I thought it would.’ Not only did Arnold not say something like that or give any cues that he was joking, he was all bowed up. I was almost positive that he wasn’t looking to throw down, during a 15-minute break on company grounds, over something as odd as this, but he looked so defensive. What an odd thing to say, I thought, and what a weird thing to get defensive about.

Bob Peters obviously dismissed Arnold’s comment as nothing more than an obnoxious attempt to interrupt him before continuing, “As I was saying-”

“No,” Arnold interrupted, growing uncharacteristically confrontational. “You called me out here. I’m a human being with all the same hopes and dreams as you. I’m going to need you to acknowledge that before you continue.”

“Fine, I acknowledge that you are a living, breathing human being with all the same hopes and dreams as the rest of us,” Bob Peters said. “Now, can I continue?”

***

“What was all that about?” I asked after Arnold and I finished our conversations with Bob Peters, and he walked back to the office.

“Cripes, I forgot to apologize to Bob for all that didn’t I,” Arnold Glass said. “He just happened to step on one of my land mines, but he didn’t mean anything by it did he?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I think he just thought it was a clever intro … but what do you think he meant by it?”

“I don’t know. It’s that name thing,” Arnold said. “I thought Bob was trying to be funny, but now that I think about it, I’m not sure Bob even knows my last name. I know I don’t know his. We’re not on a last name basis.”

“Peters,” I said. “Bob Peters.”

“Okay, Peters. Well, God bless him for having such a normal last name.”

“Glass? What’s wrong with Glass?” 

“We’ve never talked about this?” Arnold asked me with some fatigue. “You obviously didn’t grow up watching The Brady Bunch, did you?” I said I had, and the name George Glass immediately came to mind, but I feigned ignorance. “There was an episode where Jan Brady made up an imaginary boyfriend. When she was pressed for his name, she said, “George,” and then she looked around and saw a glass of water. “George Glass,” she said.”

“Okay, yeah, I remember that.” 

“I’ve had nightmares about that scene.”

“You’ve got to be joking?” I asked with suspicious but confused laughter. 

“I’m not. I’m really not,” Arnold said with a most serious face. “We were all too young to know the episode when it first came out, but, you know, reruns. I might’ve been in 2nd grade when Mary Beth Driscoll said, “Are you even real?” I didn’t get it, because I never saw the episode, so she explained it. I didn’t think it was funny, but everyone else did. Everyone else did, and they joined in on the joke. It hurt a little, but mainly because I didn’t understand it. Then, every time they reran that episode, I’d get some semblance of that joke, and I probably took way too personal, but I was young, real young, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. ‘We’re just joking, for gosh sakes Arnie’ they’d say, and that never made it any better. Things like that are stupid, insignificant, and irrelevant, until they start to gather moss. Every time you meet a friend’s mom, they ask if you’re real, or they say it’s nice to finally meet you. We thought you were fake. It sort of petered out after a while. The harmless and stupid jokes never ended, but I didn’t hear them as often for quite a while there, until the 1996 movie A Very Brady Sequel came out, and then the internet picked that whole joke up as a meme for imaginary boyfriends, girlfriends, and imaginary friends, and it started all over again.” 

I could’ve, and probably should’ve, expressed some sort of sympathy, but I couldn’t help but find it so harmless that it was cute and cute-funny. The general idea of a man being mentally badgered about anything calls for a sympathetic response, but to hear someone say that a Brady Bunch joke was the source of his pain was so unprecedented that I couldn’t help but find humor in it. I managed to keep a straight face, a solemn, sympathetic face, until he said:

“I’ve even considered changing my name more than once. I’m serious. Totally serious,” he added when I ‘C’mon’ed him’. “If my dad didn’t talk me off that ledge, talking about breaking the long, storied history of the Glasses, and their proud British heritage, I would’ve gone through with it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said when I laughed. “It’s just the words breaking the Glass got to me,” I confessed. Those words weren’t funny, but it didn’t take much to tip me into laughter, and I considered it a decent excuse for laughing.

“It’s really not funny, and it’s not a joke,” Arnold said defensively. “When I was in my teens, and I’d meet my girlfriends’ families, their sisters would jab me in the shoulder with their finger and say things like, “I just wanted to make sure you were real.” Another person, a mom, a nice, sweet maternal mom said, “We thought it was like that time Jan Brady made up a boyfriend, and she said his name was George Glass. We thought Julie did that with you. Sorry, but we thought she made you up.”

“My guess is that’s probably happened a million times,” I said after I achieved some level of control. “Nerdy girls and boys have made up boyfriends and girlfriends since, probably since the cavemen.”

“I get that,” Arnold said, “and if it happened once or twice, I’d say it’s only happened once or twice, and that’s normal, as you say, but it’s happened so often that … that you can’t help but question your identity and your existence.”

“Your existence?”

“Well, I never thought I wasn’t real, if that’s what you’re asking,” Arnold Glass said, “but these things, these little tiny, and seemingly insignificant things, can have a cumulative effect that can, regrettably, end up all over someone like Bob. Remind me to apologize to him when I see him.”   

“Example?”

“Example, let’s see,” Arnold said. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your nose. Let me make that clear, because I’d hate to put you through what I’ve been through. I mean it’s not too long, too big, or crooked. You have a very normal nose on your face, but imagine if someone joked that there was something wrong with it. Imagine if it was nothing more than a dumb, insignificant and untrue comment on your nose. You’d tell them to shut up, or some variation thereof that allows you to swat their comment away, like a pesky mosquito. Now imagine that someone else, someone who had no relation to that first person, says the same exact thing. You might start to think there’s something to it. You might be a little paranoid about your nose, right? Maybe? Now imagine that this silly, stupid thing is the same thing your grade school peers hit you with when you were young, very young, too young to know how to deal with it properly. It has a way of chasing you into adulthood, until you’re impulsively launching on someone like Bob. Do you think it could lead to a cumulative effect equivalent to wanting to change your name, like getting a nose job or something? And the whole time, you know you have a perfectly normal nose, because everyone says there’s nothing wrong with your nose, like I had a perfectly normal name, until some writer on some stupid show decided your last name would be the perfect name for an imaginary person.

“See, what you saw was a one-time, seemingly insignificant incident,” Arnold continued. “But you didn’t see the buildup, the accumulation, and you probably just think it was bizarre, and all that, but it was the result of a cumulative effect. Have you ever heard of the Chinese Water Torture effect? They strapped a guy into a chair so tight, he couldn’t move, under a slowly dripping water faucet. Now, we can drop anywhere from one droplet of water to a million drops of water on a person’s forehead, and it won’t cause any physical damage to that forehead, but psychologically? Psychologically, it’s been documented as one of the most cruel, brutal, and inhumane forms of torture ever invented. Why? It is the accumulation of seeing the next drop of water, knowing it’s going to hit your head, and it finally hitting. It’s the same thing here, but my slow drip has occurred over the years, the decades, and it can manifest in ways you saw today with Bob Peters. Some say it can be stressful to the point of panic-inducing attacks. That’s never happened to me, those final stages, but it could. Some say it could.” 

I still couldn’t see it, and in many ways I still can’t. The whole idea of it obviously still fascinates me, but no matter how well Arnold researched what happened to him that led him to his unusual outburst, and how persuasive he was in the moment, I still couldn’t wrap my arms around the idea of what he described as a cumulative effect, even under the umbrella of Chinese Water Torture effect. It was hard to see through the bizarre, silliness of the idea, and it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around the idea that a person could be so damaged by a Brady Bunch joke that he’s reflexively lashing out at anyone who even hints that he might not be real, imaginary, or in this case not human. The only thing I can come up with is it’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is something we feel for someone experiencing something foreign to our experience. Empathy is almost a shared sentiment we have for someone who is experiencing something for which we experienced ourselves to such a degree our knowledge of it can be intimate, and the only people who can understand The Brady Bunch Glass effect are those who have experienced themselves. 

The Origins of the Pejoratives

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“You, my friend, are what they call a joker,” I told Shelley Macintosh. “A real joker.”

“A joker?” Shelley asked. “What’s a joker? Did you mean a jokester? Do you mean joker, as in the playing card, or the bad guy from Batman?”

“A joker,” I said, measuring her reaction to see if she was playing with me. “A joker. A person who jokes around a lot. I don’t know. Everyone says it. It’s a common phrase everyone uses it to describe a person who jokes around a lot. Are you messing with me? You’ve never heard of the term joker before?”

After some back and forth, we established the fact that Shelley never heard the word used in that context before. As incomprehensible as I considered it that a woman who was roughly my age, who grew up in the area I did with all the same colloquialisms, and watched the same shows growing up, never heard the word, I then wondered where I did. 

Etymologists trace the historical origins of words, but their professional focus remains on more formal and serious words. There is some less serious research into the history of vulgar vocabulary, but a term that is nestled somewhere in  between, like joker, doesn’t receive much focus from either party. Joker might not be a great example of a pejorative, as it doesn’t really belittle anyone, put anyone in their place, offend anyone, or hurt their feelings, but put in a certain context, “You’re a real joker, aren’t you?” it could be confrontational. Those words could be fighting words, but we’d have to frame them up with the right face to get that done. 

We know that the Ancient Egyptians had court jesters, that could be called jokers, to entertain their pharaohs dating back to the Fifth Dynasty, and the Romans employed them to provide comic relief for their leaders, but how did the term joker weave its way through the timeline to my mouth in the 20th Century?  

How does a word, any word, travel through time? Some are fascinated by this, as evidenced by those who choose professions in various professional language specialist arenas, but to those of us who choose more common professions it’s so boring we don’t want to devote any of the precious time we have left on Earth to it. In principle, it’s interesting to wonder how a word might travel from Ancient Greece to modern English, but the research is not as fascinating as readers might think. I’ve had friends drop words and phrases I found fascinating. “Where did you hear that word?” I wondered aloud thinking that that word was exclusive to the first person I heard use it. I did my research, and I found it personally fascinating to learn that some of these words and phrases predate me by hundreds to thousands of years. Fascinating, right? Wrong, people don’t go so far as to yawn in my face, say “who cares?” or drop a playful characterization of my bookishness on me, but they don’t find the history of words nearly as fascinating as I do. 

In my research, I found that a large number of the words and phrases we use every day derive most often from various stages of Latin, English, Ancient Greece, The Bible, and Shakespeare. Look up your favorite word, and you’ll find that most of the words and phrases you use every day are derived from one of those sources, and the reason we stress derived is that as these words travel through time they modify slightly in meaning, totally transform, and on some very rare occasions remain somewhat in tact, in spelling and meaning, for thousands of years.  

Most don’t call their peers out on their word choices in the manner Shelley did, because why would we? Unless it involves a swear word, or some unique way of expressing emotions, it’s just not that interesting to us. We also don’t call each other out on the origin of the more common words and phrases we use, because we operate on a certain, unspoken and conditional quid pro quo. “I’ll tell you what, I won’t call you out on these words and phrases you use,” we say without saying, “if you don’t call me out, because I don’t know anything about their origin either.” 

One important note, before we continue, is as Etymology.com points out, “etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what words mean, what they they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago, and how they’ve traveled through time. Etymology is a science that studies the history of a word. It is a subfield of linguistics, philology, and semiotics. Etymology also studies the word’s progressions from one language to another, how it changes from one language to another, its changes in form and meaning, and some semblance of its origins.” The best and most succinct definition of etymology is that it’s the history of a word. 

If this entire article is nothing more than retread for you, and you’re not only familiar but intimately knowledgeable about the general idea of etymologies, and if you have an unusual love of language and all of the manipulative power of a clever lexicon, my bet is someone, somewhere has already called you a nerd, a nincompoop, or a total nimrod.  

Nimrod: A slightly dim-witted individual, a dolt.

Etymology: There are more professional, professorial, and well-researched theories on the etymological origin of nimrod out there, and their tracings are all over the place, but we prefer the more childish, amateurish word-of-mouth theories that appeal to those who prefer Buggs Bunny to long-since deceased authors monkeying around with a term. The idea that one of our favorite Saturday morning cartoons had some influence on the language we share is just far more entertaining. 

The etymology of nimrod begins with The Great Nimrod (a name that can, apparently, only be mentioned with computer-enhanced reverb and some form of trumpet accompaniment). The Nimrod of Biblical lore was either the great-grandson of Noah (a man who built an ark), son of Cush, or Ham (depending on the source?), and the King of Shinar. Nimrod is also reputed to be the leader of the people who built the Tower of Babel in Shinar.  

Nimrod was considered “the first on earth to be a mighty man”. He was also considered one of the great hunters of his day and “a mighty hunter before the Lord”. Nimrod was such a mighty character in the book of Genesis 10:8–12 that there are some references that declare subjects of the kingdom of Assyria called it, “The Land of Nimrod” 1 Chronicles 1:10. 

Having said all that, we could assume that most considered Nimrod, the man, the myth, the legend beyond reproach, but anyone who knows anything about Looney Tunes knows that only made him prime for a satirical representation. For them, the rich tradition and folklore surrounding Nimrod made him the perfect analogy for their fumbling, stumbling hunter, Elmer Fudd.

In a 1948 episode called What Makes Daffy Duck, the brilliant and underrated comedic actor Daffy Duck refers to Elmer Fudd as “my little Nimrod”. To show how much the writers loved the characterization, they did it again, in a 1951 episode entitled Rabbit Every Monday in which they had Buggs Bunny refer to Yosemite Sam as “The Little Nimrod”. 

A young child, who knows nothing of the King of Shinar, or the first mighty man of Earth, might hear this term and decide to use it against her brother, the next time he he does something foolish. Her erudite parents might overhear this and ask her if she realizes she’s calling her brother a mighty man. To clarify, they might tell the tale of the great Nimrod, and she might pause while soaking all this in. My guess is the next time her brother messes up, however, nimrod will be the first word out of her mouth, because there’s something uniquely satisfying about the sound of the word, and its unique power might derive from its uniqueness. Not many people place nimrod in their regular pejorative rotation, but when they do use it, it just feels deliciously degrading.

Chances are the daughter didn’t know where she heard the term nimrod, but everyone from my era knows that not only did we watch Looney Tunes a lot, but our local programmers ran the cartoon so often, showing so many reruns, that we could almost recite each short in real time, and we all know the conscious and subconscious power of repetition. 

The brilliance of these particular Looney Tunes’ shorts lies in the idea anytime a duck or a rabbit are confronted by a human, or a hunter, they should experience fear and intimidation. As animals at the the bottom of the food chain, they know that their lives are always on the line. The humor lies in their mockery of that principle, in general, and Elmer Fudd in particular, for his stature as a mighty hunter before the Lord. Thus, the writers of Looney Tunes almost single-handedly, redefined the term nimrod for an era and beyond as someone who has an unusual belief in oneself in principle, only to show he is actually so bad at it that we question his mental acuity. 

So, the next time someone attempts to belittle you with the pejorative nimrod, ask them if they’re referring to “The mighty hunter before the Lord,”, the King of Shinar, or Elmer Fudd. As much as we all loved Elmer Fudd growing up, regardless his foibles, we might not be insulted either way.

Dunce: A slow-witted or stupid person. A pejorative term that refers to one’s inability to learn. Generations ago, a student who failed to learn, or exhibited a lack of discipline was often forced to sit in a decidedly prominent corner of the room, wearing a dunce cap, or cone. Dunce was, at one time, one of the worst pejoratives one could call another.

Etymology: Once seen as one of the most brilliant philosophical theologians of his day, John Duns Scotus’ philosophies, and teachings, garnered such a substantial following that his followers called themselves Dunsmen, or Dunsers, after the theologian’s middle name. Unfortunate for the Subtle Doctor and his followers, the Renaissance happened. The Renaissance was a cultural movement that sought to render all of the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity obsolete. The Renaissance involved so many changes in so many fields that it evolved into a cultural movement that eventually rendered Scotus’ teachings obsolete by “modern” standards. Those who ascribed to the new theories of the Renaissance developed such loyalty to the “modern” ways of thinking that they derided anyone who refused to modernize. As one of the most prominent adherents to classical modes of thought, John Duns Scotus and his followers, were singled out for ridicule. As such, proponents of the Renaissance called anyone who refused to modernize to the cultural changes happening around them, Dunsers. As anyone who knows about the history of words and pejoratives knows, some words are either purposely or accidentally mispronounced or altered over time for a variety of reasons, and Dunsers became dunces.   

Nincompoop: A nincompoop is foolish, an idiot, a bonehead, or a dope. This word is decidedly out-dated, old-fashioned, and rarely used anymore. If you’ve ever had someone call you a nincompoop, chances are that person has been eligible for Social Security for at least ten years. It’s not a compliment, but in the pantheon of pejoratives, it is not a wounding insult either. If you ever decide to use the pejorative on someone, the backlash might prove greater than the intended insult. Some suggest that the more common pejorative ninny derived from nincompoop, because people felt weird saying the complete word nincompoop. Although ninny wields far more power than nincompoop, it should be used judiciously, as the backlash could be just as severe. Although most of us have never heard of these two pejoratives, and even fewer have experimented with them in a pejorative sense, we caution people who might use such terms in the hopes of achieving some sort of retro-feel, because neither of them sound right, and there’s just no way that nincompoop can achieve the desired effect.   

Etymology: Some suggest this word is derived from the Latin legal phrase non compos mentis “insane, mentally incompetent” (circa 1600). Others deny this, because the Latin phrase lacks the second “N”. They say that nincompoop was probably derived from Nicodemus, which was used in French for “a fool”. Still others, suggest that it was probably just an invented word at some point.

That’s it, the latter. There’s no solid evidence on the etymology of this one, and the only time I remember hearing nincompoop delivered as an insult is when my great-aunt dropped it on me after I did something stupid. She said it with obvious exclamation points all over her voice, and she made the meanest face she could think of, but all she got out of me was laughter. I don’t know if hearing the last syllable coupled with the mean face drained it of all effectiveness, but it obviously achieved the opposite affect.  

Dolt: 16th century, Old English. Derived from dull, or dol. Middle English word dullen, meaning “to dull, make or become dazed or stupid.”

The progression to modernity has led dolt to mean a person who lacks common sense or the intelligence necessary to make good decisions in life. A dolt is different than a fool, however, as The Content Authority points out, as a fool is often educated and/or wise enough to make quality decisions but continues to do otherwise.

Bedlam: A scene or state of wild uproar and confusion. An outbreak of crazed insanity, that is not a riot. “We went to the concert the other night. A couple fights broke out on the floor, and it evolved into absolute bedlam before the authorities to regain control.” The housing unit of the pejoratives of yesteryear.

Etymology: Bedlam is a colloquial pronunciation of Bethlehem. Bethlehem, as in the name of the Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem. The hospital began as a priory, in 1247, changed to a hospital by 1402, and ultimately became a civic lunatic asylum by 1547, where it housed the insane. Most of the inmates, as they were called, were starved, shackled, and exhibited to the public in wild and frenzied states. Thus, bedlam became synonymous with frenzied, psychotic behavior. 

The proper name might be caught in transition in the title of John Davies’ 1617 publication of humorous poetry, “Wits bedlam —where is had, whipping-cheer, to cure the mad.”

The pejoratives on this list all have interesting, unusual, and noteworthy twists and turns throughout their history. Other pejoratives such as idiot, moron, imbecile and others are noteworthy not for their changes or meaning, but for their consistency through time. Some of these pejoratives existed in the B.C. (Before Christ) era. Think about that for just a second, before you yawn with fatigue, that pejorative you just called your sister was similar, if not the exact same word, a boy called his sister thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece. To my mind, the twists and turns and evolutions of words, through time, are just as interesting as the consistency of the pejoratives through thousands of years.