Wag sent me a link to this about a week ago, and unless I’m mistaken, this is right up the Balloon Juice alley. Nothing else seems to be happening in the back room, and this feels like Friday night material. I hope you’re not all in bed already!
I don’t know my way around Reddit, but this appears to be from colin_morris. Why is the person not a commenter here? So awesome! (click the image to embiggen)
Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin
Jun 28, 2022
Dirty words are, let’s face it, a lot of fun. If you want to express your dislike for someone and a standard insult like “jerk” or “moron” won’t cut it, you can get creative. There are a few reliable recipes for forming derogatory noun-noun compounds in English. For example:
Start with a word for a disgusting or worthless substance
Add a word for an agglomeration or container
Hence, dirtwad, scumbag, pissbucket, snotwagon…(In case it’s not yet clear, this post will contain a lot of bad words. Most are merely silly or crude, but some are more seriously offensive, including slurs.)
Alternatively, -head, -face, and -brain(s) are incredibly versatile suffixes, which can be preceded by just about any taboo word.
The truly creative can go outside the box with oddball constructions like fucktrumpet, or wankpuffin, which perhaps succeed more by their euphony than their ability to invoke any coherent image.
If only we had some concrete data on how these pieces fit together…
Introducing the Reddit compound pejorative dataset
I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains, including:
scatology (fart-, poop-)
political epithets (lib-, Trump-)
food (-waffle, -burger)
body parts (butt-, -face, -head, -brains)
gendered epithets (bitch-, -boy)
animals (dog-, -monkey)
Most terms were limited to appearing in one position. For example, while -face readily forms pejorative compounds as a suffix, it fails to produce felicitous compounds as a prefix (facewad? faceclown? facefart?).Taking the product of these lists gives around 4,800 possible A+B combinations. Most are of a pejorative character, though some false positives slipped in (e.g. dogpile, spitballs). I scraped all Reddit comments from 2006 to the end of 2020, and counted the number of comments containing each.
As a corpus, Reddit has the virtue of being uninhibited in its profanity, and on the cutting edge of new coinages. For example, Google Books Ngram Viewer, which indexes the majority of all books published in English up to 2019, gives no results for fuckwaffle, whereas the term has been used in 1,096 Reddit comments.
The full “matrix” of combinations is surprisingly dense. Of the ~4,800 possible compounds, more than half occurred in at least one comment. The most frequent compound, dumbass, appears in 3.6 million comments, but there’s also a long tail of many rare terms, including 444 hapax legomena (terms which appear only once in the dataset), such as pukebird, fartrag, sleazenozzle, and bastardbucket.
In fact, the dataset approximately follows Zipf’s law, meaning that a log-log plot of term rank vs. frequency is close to a straight line:
The Matrix of Pejoration
The full 66 x 73 matrix of all prefixes and suffixes is too big to fit readably in a single plot, so I’ve shown a 20 x 20 subset below, which includes many of the most frequent affixes. Note that frequency is mapped to colour using a logarithmic scale, because it varies over several orders of magnitude.
prostratedragon
Oooo, fun with data graphs1😆😆
Villago Delenda Est
A useful one that is not on the matrix that I picked up from my NCOs in the Army is “dickweed.” One of my comm chiefs used it musically…diiiiickweed, dickweed!
WaterGirl
@prostratedragon: I told you it was right uo the Balloon Juice alley!
bbleh
This — THIS — is what English is best at, of all the languages of the world. (I am not dissing English.)
NotMax
Ain’t nothing wrong with the durable classics, terms such as lickspittle.
dmsilev
I’m pretty sure that this is not what DARPA had in mind when they funded the initial research that lead to the Internet.
Villago Delenda Est
@dmsilev: I don’t’ think that Elno Muskrat is what they had in mind, either.
Shalimar
Trumpgoblin can be so many different people. Why hasn’t it been used more?
NotMax
Alas, the journal Maledicta is no more.
Jaybird
I love stats nerds!
WaterGirl
Pretty sure the next person who picks at me for something petty is getting called a wankpuffin.
WaterGirl
@Jaybird:
So say we all!
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: “He had the case of the ass like a Russian Bear”!
Ken
Shakespeare would have approved.
Rusty
I love that shit and fuck work with just about everything.
Spanky
I didn’t know “trumptard” was a thing, but it makes sense.
mawado
Better off Ted – Still the best exposition of American Business in the 21st century.
The episode https://youtu.be/Bh7Nz4bIwss?si=j-xMRfg7ZmtLDvo5
A typo leads the employees to believe they are required to insult each other. Lem and Phil invent an insult generator remarkable similar to the example.
The outtakes may be funnier than the episode which is saying a lot.
https://youtu.be/Bh7Nz4bIwss?si=Sxbwl3VjKN82d7Sr
NSFW or households or anyplace really.
Luck
Spanky
“Trumpsucker” seems like it should be a thing.
dmsilev
@Villago Delenda Est: Definitely not.
mrmoshpotato
Dogwaffle?
bbleh
@Spanky: Yes. Ditto “trumpnozzle,” which appears to occur very seldom.
mrmoshpotato
@Spanky:
That’s all of the Trump trash in the world who all suck Dump’s ass.
SteveinPHX
Some 17th and 18th Century English playwrights didn’t need this for inspiration, but damn! I bet they would have had fun!
Brings to mind Hogarth’s “Gin Lane.”
NotMax
@bbleh
Generic form: Poopnozzle.
WaterGirl
@mawado: That was really funny.
edit: but were both links supposed to be the same? Because they both took me to the outtakes. Would love to see the whole episode.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: ooh, good one!
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl: No it’s not! 🤣 It’s absolutely ridiculous! :)
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: No it isn’t, you fuckwad. :-
edit: I should not have clicked that Better Off Ted link.
Martin
Trumpnozzle needs some love, I see.
kalakal
Missing two English favourites
Bollockbrain and Cockwomble
Punchy
It’s Friday…..anyone know if Johnny still has his teaching gig?
Ken
Mornington Crescent.
AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team
Truly a full service blog!!
Ty WG :)
WaterGirl
@Punchy: Yes.
Cole got email that said everyone who was being let go had been notified, and he had not been notified, so he (mostly) assumes that he is safe.
But, you know, it would be nice if they were a little more clear than that!
WaterGirl
@AJ of the Mustard Search and Rescue Team: Full props to Wag for sending it along, and to colin_morris – whoever he is! – on Reddit.
NotMax
Not a single word but an insult recently came across which is superb:
“He could count his number of brain cells on both hands, if he knew that numbers go up that high.”
Martin
@WaterGirl: Actually, I think only 2.3% of us would actually ‘love’ data nerds. 13.6% would ‘like’, 34.1% would ‘approve’, a similar would ‘disapprove’, 13.6% would ‘dislike’ and 2.3% would ‘hate’.
kalakal
@Ken: Ah Tudor Court Rules, I see.
Freemark
Shit, dick, and especially fuck go with everything like a good Pinot Noir.
Martin
@WaterGirl: Clarity removes your options. Ambiguity lets you continue to fuck people over even when you say you’re done doing so.
TS
@WaterGirl:
Idea is to get folks so worried when they send out a new contract with the salary halved it is accepted with thanks.
Fear is the operative word for any RW organisation.
WaterGirl
@Martin: I dunno, I think that the stats related to like, love or approve would be pretty high on Balloon Juice. Much higher than in the general population.
Wouldn’t you agree?
Another Scott
A friend tried to teach his young sons that bucket head was a near-swear insult. I don’t think it took with them, probably fortunately.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
NotMax
@kalakal
“Purveyors to the Crown since 1802.”
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@WaterGirl: So say 79.3% ± 3.4% of us, with a very high degree of confidence (p < .025) .
🤪
Ken
@kalakal: It is Friday the 13th.
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl: Take that back, you dipnozzle!
WaterGirl
@TS: If only this were a post where I could find a swear word that’s bad enough to describe how awful that mode of operation is.
WaterGirl
@Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog: hahaha
Yeah, that’s about right.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: I’ll take it back, right after I stop laughing, which could be awhile.
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl: Hehehe! Is it raining all weekend downstate too?
Ben Cisco
The day I saw an illustration of an actual asshat I almost split my spleen.
mrmoshpotato
@Ben Cisco:
Did you see this on the interwebs?
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: We were supposed to have rain from noon until midnight, but it didn’t really start until a a few hours ago, and it’s supposed to be done by morning.
You’re getting rain all weekend?
Ben Cisco
@mrmoshpotato: I did
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl: Looks like it. Good football watching weekend.
Central Planning
@dmsilev:
Those fuckwaffles!
Other MJS
@Rusty:
True enough, but who says “shitshit” or “fuckfuck”? Some people, apparantly.
bbleh
@Martin: 23% — nearly 1/4! — would “agree” or “mostly agree” with your estimates, and as usual 37% would “disagree entirely.” The rest “partially agree” or “partially disagree” and have comments which are detailed below.
SpaceUnit
If this is what passes for scientific research in 2023 then goddamn I need a time machine.
The big question: forward or back?
mrmoshpotato
@Central Planning: I think of them more as clownwanks.
Chetan Murthy
@Villago Delenda Est: IIUC, “shitbird” is also an Army term.
bbleh
@Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog: Yabbut that level of confidence assumes an underlying distribution such that the distribution of the estimate of the mean is Normal, and BJ is … skewed.
jonas
This reminds me of the Twitter threads produced after the Brexit vote when SFB posted something to the effect that he was so proud of Scotland where his amazing golf resort was located voting to ditch the EU. A number of commenters kindly reminded him that Scotland had voted overwhelmingly to “stay”, in a cavalcade of multisyllabic, poly-imagistic profanity the likes of which had never been seen and which only the jaded, ale-lubricated wordsmiths of the British Isles can produce. This is the forum where the term “cheeto-faced shitgibbon” was first coined, iirc.
Ken
@SpaceUnit: This reminds me, I want to thank whoever recommended James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History in the recent Medium Cool. Oddly, my library catalogs it under physics; I would have put it under literature.
Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog
@bbleh: All taken care of by a non-parametric resampling approach, which requires no assumptions about the shape of the underlying bafflegab. Thus do I refute Aristophanes!
🤣
Wag
@bbleh: With a double fuck one simply adds an “ity” between the two, and voila! Fuckityfuck emerges fully formed.
Unfortunately shitityshit doesn’t roll of the tongue with the same energy.
karen marie
“twat clown”?
How did that score so high? I’ve never heard (or seen) anyone use that once.
Ken
@Wag: You remind me of my pre-teen years, when having heard Shirley Ellis’s “The Name Game“, all the kids thought they were incredibly clever and the first to notice what happened when you used “Chuck”.
kalakal
@Wag:
The master of using fuck with everything was Malcom Tucker*, the Peter Capaldi character in The Thick of It
eg always ending a hostile phone call with a snarl of
“Fuckitybye!”
* Based on Alastair Campbell, ex Journo and Blair’s comms director
prostratedragon
Waltz from Die Fledermaus,” Strauss II.
John S.
@Wag:
That’s because for words already ending in “it” you don’t add the full “ity”. Simply add the “y” to avoid redundancy.
Now you have a usable shitty* shit to go along with fuckity fuck.
*And of course you have to add back the extra “t” in there because English.
ETA: 🎶 If it ends in “it”, avoid redundancy. Just drop the “i” and proceed with “ty”. 🎶
mrmoshpotato
@prostratedragon: Are there a whole bunch of “fucknozzle”s in this?
Wag
@John S.: There’s some fuckityshit hidden in this data set.
prostratedragon
@mrmoshpotato: Just watched Gaslight. Anton strikes it up in the piano as part of his happy-go-lucky distraction act.
John S.
@Wag: There be some shitty fuckity shit hidden in there as well.
Argiope
@Martin: have you MET us? We are skewed AF.
Hoppie
Not a single compound word, but I always liked “addlepated pilgarlic” as an insult most people are, er, puzzled by. I guess asshat is the updated version
Also the 70’s joke “impeach the Cox-sacker”.
West of the Rockies
@Ken:
That was Tom Levenson (with an agreement from me).
NotMax
The f*cking wheel? Don’t ask.
Dangerman
Fuck is such a flexible word (as opposed to flexible fucks and we fucking aren’t doing yoga in here).
Anger: Fuck you!
Regret: Fuck me!
Philosophical: Who gives a fuck?
… which leads to things like who gives a flying Philadelphia fuck, which I’ve never really figured out, but I think it involves flexibility and an unbalanced washing machine, so fuck it, we are NOT doing yoga here.
Shalimar
@mrmoshpotato: 0ee078637f859a95171050f1a7354d71.jpg (640×444) (pinimg.com)
Only one I could find that was a fedora.
divF
One of my favorite epithets is from the movie Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, in which Wallace Shawn calls Ed Begley Jr. an “ass-licking poseur”.
John Revolta
@Villago Delenda Est: I used to hear “dickweed” in North Jersey. Never knew what the hell it meant but it didn’t really matter.
divF
@Hoppie: Did you hear the one about the coke-sacker, the cork-soaker, and the sock-tucker ?
I first ran across this in Gravity’s Rainbow, but my impression from looking at the internet just now is that it is a widespread joke in the Navy.
Hoppie
@divF: I never managed to get more than a few pages into a Pynchon novel, so missed those. But Nixon was the one!
BruceFromOhio
There’s some letters of the alphabet missing, methinks. Like pejoratives that start with the letter ‘a’ perhaps.
NotMax
@BruceFromOhio
Antwaffle?
;)
mrmoshpotato
@Shalimar: Wow! LMAO!
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Antiwaffle! Aka pancakes! Only on par when cooked in bacon grease.
Go waffles!
am
fuckwad over dickwad? i truly feel old now.
piratedan
back to two bsky invites, ping me at piratedan7@g****.com if you wish one.
piratedan
back to two bsky invites, ping me at piratedan7@g****.com if you wish one.
piratedan
if anyone needs a bsky invite, ping me in this thread
HumboldtBlue
Stanford trailed 29-0 at Colorado and the Deions, the Cardinal just made a historic comeback to win 46-43.
We’re losing the Pac 12 as a collegiate athletic conference, and there is something criminal in that happening.
eclare
I wonder how douchecanoe came about? Maybe it’s just fun to say.
prostratedragon
@HumboldtBlue: There are those in B1G country who quite agree.
lowtechcyclist
@dmsilev:
Well, tough luck for them, because as we all know, the Internet is for porn.
lowtechcyclist
@Central Planning:
Fuckwaffles! I wonder if you can order them at IHOP or Waffle House. Or if Chick-Fil-A or MickeyD’s has Chicken FuckNuggets.
lowtechcyclist
@Hoppie:
It wasn’t just a joke, it was a bumper sticker! Saw it frequently in 1974.
WaterGirl
Good morning! I am kind of shocked that this only made it to 100 overnight. You guys are slacking off. :-)
mawado
@WaterGirl: Sorry, it’s season 2 episode 8.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00C13ZE1Y/ref=atv_hm_hom_c_lZOsi7_2_2?jic=8%7CEgNhbGw%3D
I think you have to pay. I bought the series years ago. It’s one of my go to stress relief shows.
Luck
WaterGirl
@mawado: I don’t think that show was ever on my radar.
But I don’t usually watch comedies. Exceptions: Spin City and Frasier. Maybe one more whose name is escaping me at the moment?
EthylEster
Re: hapax legomena
I just learned this term today and then I encounter it here.
If only I was clever enough to craft a comment about that….
brantl
I think TrumpPuppet is particularly apt.
WaterGirl
@brantl:
That is a good one!
Ked
Assass?
Twatnozzle??
COCKWAFFLE???
Yikes.
Cacti
@HumboldtBlue: Really is a pity to see the Pac 12 go.
Aren’t Cal and Stanford joining the “Atlantic Coast” Conference?