Are you a dotard or a Centrist Dad? Oh do keep up|Alex Clark
Life is hard if you’re a pedant. When Kim Jong-un taunted Donald Trump by pronouncing that “a frightened dog barks louder”, I paused for longer than one might in the face of an approaching apocalypse to wonder whether it shouldn’t be “barks more loudly”.
But that didn’t sound quite right. Then again, a verb needs an adverb, right? And on and on, while everyone else Googled “intercontinental ballistic missile medium range how far”. With “dotard”, however, I was on surer ground, having had my nose in a book since God was a lad. I knew it wasn’t some new variation on those revolting insults that people fling about on the internet – libtard, cucktard, etc – but rather a word that goes right back to Chaucer and Shakespeare and means, essentially, batty old man.
This is one of the problems with Kim Jong-un: even terrifyingly dangerous and brutal dictators are occasionally on the money.
Why are so many of these insults centred on male potency? Why do they tacitly equate power with masculinity and youth?
Meanwhile, it was lucky that everyone had dotard to think about, because it was a brief diversion from trying to work out what a Centrist Dad is. This is one of those Twitter neologisms – in this case a Twinsult, if you will – that suddenly crops up and makes you feel out of the current affairs loop. Roughly speaking, it appears to describe the kind of man whose politically moderate views make everyone dislike him and who – this is the dad thing – is also keen to assert the responsible, nurturing, forward-looking part of their identity.
Centrist Dad is not the “absolute boy” – Jeremy Corbyn himself – and although he might be an “absolute melt” (weedy), I don’t think he’s quite as disdained as an “absolute slug” (baddie). But I may have that all arse about face.
It is impossible to keep up. “Cuck” took me forever to work out, even though I sort of knew what it meant and assumed it was related to the word “cuckold”. Why are so many of these insults centred on male potency? Why do they tacitly equate power with masculinity and youth? Why do I feel like it’s 1994 and I’m reading an issue of Loaded? Don’t answer, these are entirely rhetorical questions.
It's easy to find an insult clever when you agree with it, for example, when Boris Johnson was dubbed Schrödinger’s Twat
Hurling insults around is nothing new, of course. When Denis Healey described being attacked by Geoffrey Howe as “like being savaged by a dead sheep”, even the ovine imagery wasn’t a first; Winston Churchill had already described Clement Attlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”.
Perhaps they simply did it better in the olden days. Trump, after all, is a useless insulter, leaving exclamation marks and capital letters to do far too much of the heavy lifting. “Madman”, “loser terrorist”, “sad” – who is left reeling by that? Is there a more underpowered jibe than “Crooked Hillary”?
It is, of course, easy to find an insult clever when you agree with its sentiment; when Russell Brand called Nigel Farage “a pound shop Enoch Powell”, for example, or when Boris Johnson was dubbed, on last week’s Remainiacs podcast “Schrödinger’s Twat”.
Naturally, we all abhor ad hominem attacks, gratuitous offensiveness, outright abuse. Some of us also feel that anger is not an excuse for standards and grammar to slip. But we can cope with a bit of to and fro, surely? It’s not as if we’re all melts.
