21 July 2016

Sparkling Epithets

Boris will have to do better.

by Chin Chin

I just don’t understand it.  There is George W Bush, one of America’s less convincing presidents, described by Boris as “a cross-eyed Texan warmonger”. There is Hillary Clinton, a woman who cannot even control her email account, awarded “blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.”  Even President Erdogan gets a mention in a ditty which rhymes “Ankara” with “wankerer”.  Yet for me there is nothing.  Not one little word of abuse.  Nothing to show that I ever existed.

It isn’t just Boris.  Churchill did it too, and, actually, he did it rather better.  He too was a journalist and the targets for his sallies encompassed friend and foe alike.  Attlee: “a very modest man. Indeed he has a lot to be modest about”.  How pleased Attlee must have been with that. It is not just rude, it has subtlety and elegance.  If you search for it on the Internet you will find a message from someone in Eastern Europe overseas who pleads:

“Please could someone explain this. ‘Modesty’ is good? Yes?”

When I last looked, no one had attempted the explanation but to go down in history as the butt of a joke which only the cognoscenti could enjoy, that would truly be glorious!

Churchill threw his epithets around generously and the best ones clearly conferred the prospect of immortality. Crowds of people must have stood around being mildly annoying and hoping to become a target of one, rather like bridesmaids hoping to catch the bouquet at a wedding.  There was a little cheating of course; there were those who deliberately set the great man up with an irresistible opportunity.  When Bernard Shaw sent Churchill an invitation to his new play, inviting him to “bring a friend, if he had one”, it was the equivalent of sending a slow lob to Roger Federer.  Back came the whiplash response.  Mr Churchill regretted that he could not attend but would come to the second night “if there was one”.

It would be wrong to expect Boris to rival Churchill.  Few can do that, but he could certainly broaden his target area.  We live in a populist and egalitarian age and it just isn’t good enough to restrict insults to the political elite.  What about those who feel politically disenfranchised? We saw how excluded they feel from the political mainstream by the way they rejected the recommendations of party leaders in the Brexit vote.  How will they feel if the only people properly insulted are politicians and Liverpudlians?

In the normal way it might not matter.  We are a tough bunch on this Island and can survive being ignored, but now that Boris is to be Foreign Secretary he will have to act more diplomatically.  When Jean-Marc Ayrault, the foreign minister of France, called Johnson “a liar” and Germany’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier described him as “outrageous”, all that they got back was a weak line about plaster falling form the ceilings of the chancelleries of Europe.  Not good enough, Boris.  What an opportunity was missed.  It is the function of the Foreign Secretary to flatter his opposite numbers and there is no better way of doing that than to award each of them an epithet which will secure them a place in history.  That would have been of even more use than a nicely framed photograph of Her Majesty, the Queen.  They have been sold short and no doubt they feel it.  Boris may come to rue his laziness.

Speaking for myself, the problem is a practical one.  I did not go to Eton. I am no representative of a foreign power.  I don’t even live in Liverpool. How am I to attract a good quality epithet?   How have other people in my position solved similar problems in the past?

Perhaps the nearest comparisons are honours and Parliamentary questions. Technically speaking, you are not supposed to pay for either but the scandals which break out from time to time indicate that there must be some sort of a black market in both.  Why not a market in insults then with prices appropriate to their effectiveness?  The more you pay, the better turned the insult.  The price would also reflect the status of the person doing the insulting.  You would pay a lot for Boris Johnson but rather less for, say, Nicky Morgan.  Insults inverse would carry a premium.

This sort of thing is not as novel as you might think.  In the S&M industry, perfectly respectable men pay considerable sums to be beaten physically with canes.  Well, if that is acceptable (and in an era when the transsexual community is becoming mainstream, who would dare to say that it was not?) why not pay to be verbally assaulted instead?  It probably hurts less and the benefits, going as they would to long term reputation rather than immediate gratification, would be much more worthwhile.

One possibility would be to allow the person buying the insult to decide its terms but I think that that would be in poor taste.  Although Churchill commented that history would be kind to him because he intended to write it, drafting your own epitaph is generally regarded as bad form and I think the same could be said for buying a specific insult.  In any case for an insult to work there has to be just a tinge of malice and it would be difficult to get the spite-content right when writing about yourself.  There would be too much danger  of producing something which was not up to scratch so perhaps the design of the insult should be left to professionals.  After all, as any French scholar will tell you, a mot juste is just a word.  In the end you want that word to be the work of a master.

 

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