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ArmadilloFour t1_j68fm66 wrote

Reply to comment by Just_thefacts_jack in After 30+ years, 'The Stinky Cheese Man' is aging well by drak0bsidian

Every negative term has been wielded against ostracized groups. At some point you have to stop blacklisting words for that reason, or you're going to simply run out of negative words to use.

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Just_thefacts_jack t1_j6ca9rm wrote

I don't know if I agree, I sorta took it as a challenge to come up with more creative insults instead of punching down (whether intentionally or not).

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ArmadilloFour t1_j6d1gz9 wrote

And that's admirable! But I feel like either you've got to come up with incredibly arbitrary terms to use which just feel made up and hard to understand the connotations of ("Yuck, that dude is such a gooseberry!"), or you pick another term which already has sort of negative vibes ("I thought that book was really sludgy"), but you have to work to wrap the word around a meaning it doesn't have. And either way, it feels inevitable that if either of them caught on, they would be applied to ostracized groups in a way that would bring us right back to where we started ("I hate that dude, he's such a gooseberry" -> "You shouldn't call people gooseberries, it's got an ableist history".)

What more creative insults did you come up with, out of curiosity?

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Just_thefacts_jack t1_j6oawfa wrote

Gooseberry is/was a popular one in the UK. I also landed on Muppet, potato, loaf of bread/piece of toast, dipshit, lump, clod, lummox. Really any word for an inanimate object, especially simple/unremarkable objects, seems to do the trick.

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