Great Archaic Ways To Insult Someone

Kim Jong-un called Donald Trump a dotard. Here are some equally entertaining out-of-date options the 45th president could've thrown back in his face.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from How Stuff Works a brain
stuff It's Christian saga. After President Trump referred to Kim
Jong un as rocketman during a speech at the United Nations,
the North Korean Supreme Leader issued a statement referring to
Trump as a quote mentally deranged U S dodord. According

(00:24):
to reports, North Korea's communications team has been known to
actually use out of date English Korean dictionaries for translation.
So maybe there's something to the forty five American president's
claims that he has the best words. Regardless if nothing
else comes out of this latest incident, at least the
word dodord is having a moment. Here's what it means,

(00:48):
as well as a few more insulting terms that have
gone the way of the dodo but that we're hoping
at some point will enjoy their own renaissance. So Kim
Jong un called Donald Trump a do modored What is
that exactly? The term goes back to the thirteen hundreds
and means someone who's in his or her dotage, which,

(01:08):
according to the Miriam Webster Dictionary, is quote a state
or period of senile decay marked by decline of mental
poise and alertness. In recent years, dodored has primarily shown
up in writing about the arts. Have you ever met
someone who sticks to their ways despite being shown better

(01:29):
or more correct approaches. Perhaps you've got that relative who
just prefers not to use smartphone shortcuts or hot key
combinations on their laptop. Congrats, you are related to a mumpsimus.
Miriam Webster suggests that the etymology of mumpsimus goes back
to an illiterate priest who mistakenly used the term in

(01:51):
place of the Latin word sumpsimus, which means we have taken.
He did this during a mass ritual, but refused to
correct himself even after the error was pointed out. Now,
everyone's got that pedantic friend who only interrupts or chimes
in to correct another person. You may call them nitpicky,
no it alls who lived to contradict with an irritating

(02:15):
well technically or just plain old man splainers, But why
not call them a snout band? That is the forgotten
old English insult, and that's what it means snout band.
The med lar, however, is a type of hard skinned
fruit with a gaping open apex, and the only time

(02:37):
it's soft enough to eat is when it's on the
verge of going bad, so it was often associated with
rotten nous and showed up in insulting references to prostitution,
genitals and rear ends. In post Renaissance England, medlars were
often called open arses due to their appearance, making for

(02:57):
plenty of word play in insult potential in poems and plays.
Shakespeare in particular enjoyed the medlar, using the word as
a pun on Medler in Time and of Athens, and
for some of Mecurtio's teasing of Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.
Jokes about medlars appeared even earlier than that, though, popping

(03:20):
up in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the late foe century.
But what do you call someone who, shrewd and cunning
as they may be, seems to be motivated by no
principles whatsoever, especially if that someone is in politics. Well,
snolly gostar is the term you're looking for. Popularized in

(03:43):
the eighteen nineties by the Georgia politician Colonel H. J. W. Ham,
the term goes back at least a half decade more
than that. In eight Ohio newspaper defined it thus Lee quote.
A snolly gowstar is a fellow who wants office regardless
of party platform er principles, and who, whenever he wins,

(04:05):
gets there by the sheer amount of monumental talk. Na
fickle Assumancy who snollygastar disappeared from much of the twenty century,
but enjoyed a brief resurgence during President Harry S. Truman's
nineteen fifty two re election campaign, when he used the
term in reference to other candidates. And here's our last one.

(04:29):
You want to insult someone's cooking, call that play in
front of you a slum gullion. The words gone through
some changes over its life span, but today it means
an unappetizing or cheaply made stew. In eighteen fifty ones,
Moby Dick Herman Melville used the phrase slobgollian to refer

(04:50):
to the waste from processing whale carcasses, and the word
slum gullion shows up that same decade in Miner's Diaries,
describing a slurry leftover from mining gold. In eighteen seventy two,
when Mark Twain used the word in his semi autobiographical
book Roughing It, he was using it to refer to

(05:13):
a disgusting beverage, and within two decades it was used
to refer to muddy looking stews. Today's episode was written
by Christopher hasiotis produced by Tristan McNeil, and For more
on this and other topics, please visit us at how

(05:35):
stuff works dot com