Of Luddy-Duddies, Mooncalves and Jabbernowls

From the library I have borrowed Samuel Johnson’s Insults, an Augustan Age ``Jokes for the John.” As edited by Jack Lynch, a Johnson scholar at Rutgers University, the author of “The Vanity of Human Wishes” comes off like an 18th-century Don Rickles, all one-liners and nasty retorts. This has never been the Johnson who mattered most to me, though I admire the chutzpah of the man who wrote “Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault” and who dismissed Henry Fielding as “a blockhead.”

Judging by the quantity Johnson includes in his Dictionary, 18th-century English had even more synonyms for blockheads and other worthless, contemptible people than Yiddish does today. Here’s an alphabetical sampling from Lynch’s selection: asshead, bull-calf, clodpate, droil, enthusiast. fon, garlickeater, hilding, idler, jackalent, knuff, losel, malthorse, ninnyhammer, oysterwench, puppy, quean, rakehel, scomm, thickskin, underfellow, wantwit, zany. My spell-check fails to recognize 18 of the 23 words cited – a significant loss to the English arsenal in a mere two and a half centuries, considering that Shakespeare, Dryden, Swift and Pope used most of these words. In an age of cowardly, politicized sensitivity, a dip into the 18th-century lexicon is a reminder of the wit and good sense of our ancestors and of our own impoverishment.

I almost chose “moon-calf” to represent “m” in my list because W.C. Fields used it memorably in The Bank Dick: “Don’t be a luddy-duddy. Don’t be a mooncalf. Don’t be a jabbernowl. You’re not those, are you?” I’m also reminded of the marathon insult exchanges, in English and French, that John Barth included in The Sot-Weed Factor.

Johnson was never a bully, nor was he a hypocrite, dishing out insults but whining when his critics responded in kind. On the contrary, Johnson seemed to relish a worthy opponent. When he published Taxation No Tyranny, an attack on the American colonists, Johnson responded that their anger was insufficient: “I think I have not been attacked enough for it. Attack is the re-action; I never think I have hit hard, unless it rebounds.”