To save you trawling back through old comments-threads, the byre-yard photo added a nice new word to Katie's scrabble list, but today I found a better one.
Reading Thomas Nashe's "Lenten Stuff" of 1599 - as one does - I came across a corker.
Nashe was one of the Shakespeare, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe gang of writers, poets and critics who liked nothing better than insulting one another in hilariously OTT purple prose pamphlets. Reading their diatribes is a good source of a Covid-busting giggle or three.
Anyhoo … In the intro to "Lenten Stuff", which responds to a critical pamphlet about a play he'd co-written with Ben Jonson the previous year which got banned and got them both a brief spell in the clink, our Thomas beautifully berates his critics for being "Those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cumtwangs" being "struck with such stinging remorse of their miserable Euclionism and snudgery …"
Much as I love "snudgery" my insult of the day simply has to be "crusty cumtwangs".
It actually means "miser" so it's safe to use it at work and I hope you introduce your colleagues to it at your earliest opportunity.
Lenten Stuff is available dirt cheap in the Penguin English Library paperback of Nashe's "The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works" (including some racy porn poetry which got him into all sorts of trouble).
It is actually a satirical piece in praise of Great Yarmouth, which, as long-standing Blogville residents will know is the arsehole of England. Anyone who can refer to that stinking shithole as "ten-thousand-fold delicate paramour of Neptune" and "redoubtable Sophy of the floating kingdom of Pisces" in the same paragraph has got to be worth a read.
Crusty cumtwangs. Use it today!
4 comments:
I do like "snudgery," but I have to agree.
These guys were not just inventive *with* the language, they were actually inventing it.
They were indeed, Petrea. Nashe later lays into the earlier historians of Yarmouth, calling them "the draff of the carterly hoblobs."
I can picture him and Greene and Ben Johnson sitting around a table in an alehouse criticising a play they had just seen. The language must have been glorious.
Lenten Stuff sounds like a delightful book. So many wonderful words! I'm cracking up at "greybeard huddle-duddles". It seems like the English language has become a lot less colorful.
I looked in my Book of Shakespearean Insults and crusty cumtwang's not in there. Sheesh … some writers can't research their way out of a paper bag.
Lenten Stuff is a delight indeedy. All of that rather over-competitive set of writers liked nothing more than coming up with ridiculously long neologisms and sentences a page long. Such a pity the English language has lost its sparkle.
Even Word now constantly yells at me that I've written something too flowery and that I should simplify it. Bugger that! It takes the joy out of writing.
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