[W]e would avoid the common and coarse mistake of inferring the presence or
absence of certain things, in certain communities, according to the richness or
poverty of the popular vocabulary. How often, for instance, do we give credit
to societies and to individuals, for the possession of honour, religion,
generosity, truth, &c, &c, merely because they know how to name them; while it
is notorious that they who have these things most frequently in their mouths,
have generally the smallest portion in their hearts?

anon, The New Monthly Magazine, ca. 1836

This is the first in, almost certainly, a series of irregular posts made here,
all founded on one uncomfortable but inescapable truth: it is sometimes
necessary, and enjoyable, to offer insult to others.

I can be arrogant and condescending, when attacked. I make no real apology for
this; if you've been on the receiving end of invective from me, you've richly
earned it.

But as with most things in life, anything worth doing is worth doing well. And
the problem is that there's no real art in calling someone a dirty word. Using
obscenities on people is lazy, really, but also a very peculiar, oddly
collaborative exercise that doesn't always seem appropriate, in many
circumstances.

The vast majority of insults are lazy and unoriginal. If you call someone a
bitch, you're really just calling them a dog. "Please leave promptly, you
loyal, obedient, and intelligent animal," said, or at least meant, nobody,
ever. But that, at face value, is what "get out of here, bitch" means.

If someone is insulted by this, or any of dozens of other slurs, it's because
they've deliberately chosen to interpret your proffered expression in a
negative light. It's tendering insult by consensus, by agreement; the whole
thing is kind of farcical.

I have a very large vocabulary, in English, and the occasional necessity of
insulting someone provides a great opportunity for creativity. "You are
under-endowed, functionally illiterate, horrendously insecure, and possess all
the charm of an overflowing portable toilet," I might suggest. "Please return
when you've developed the mental capacity to form an argument more complicated
than a Berenstain Bears book. "None of us can understand a word you're writing;
perhaps if you took your father's penis out of your hand and put it back in
your mouth, your typing might become merely terrible."

But the reality is that sometimes that gets kind of boring. So in the past I've
tended to mix things up a little but, by tendering insults in Latin.

Latin's a good language for insulting people. I have to confess, though, that I
don't really speak Latin; I just know a couple dozen phrases. And they don't
really have to be all that mean-spirited, honestly; you can tell the average
neo-Nazi the weather is nice in Latin, and he's going to have no idea what
you're saying. If he chooses to take offense, well, we're back to the whole
insults-by-agreement tedium, again.

Unfortunately, on a forum recently, I inadvertently ran into a misogynist who
actually speaks Latin. Awkward.

So I thought it'd be fun to learn a little bit of some obscure, possibly even
dead, language that nobody speaks, so as to be able to proffer insults in that.
Not the noblest of motives, but there you go.

Anyway, I have for very quixotic reasons settled on Novial, a constructed
"international language" from the first part of the twentieth century.

It's a very dead language. There are no native speakers. There don't appear to
be any active websites or mailing lists, though there were as recently as
perhaps fifteen years ago. In that regard, it's perfect for my purposes.

And learning at least a little bit shouldn't be impossible; the two books about
the language, including a dictionary, have been reproduced online.

I've looked through them, and two things strike me as interesting. One is that
there are no "dirty" words, in Novial. This isn't surprising, of course. But it
means that in order to craft insults, you actually have to learn how to
construct sentences, however simple. "Your mother was a hamster", for example.
"Your father smelled of elderberries" is problematic, alas; there's no Novial
word for elderberries. :(

(There is a word for "elder", in the sense of an old man, so one could say that
someone's father smelled like an old man. As insults go, this isn't especially
biting. Novial has words for three types of berry, so it's possible to
substitute, say, gooseberries.)

The other thing is that there doesn't seem to be a textbook, or any kind of
lesson. The non-dictionary book is a complicated treatise on the language,
meant for linguists, I guess. It explains how the language works on a technical
level, and provides some examples, but doesn't provide anything in the way of
lessons. So... things promise to be fun.

Anyway, here's the most basic insult I can come up with in Novial. Hopefully
it's correct.

Odia is the Novial verb for hate; odiosi is the word for spiteful or insidious;
odiindi is the word for odious. There are not a lot of words in this language,
and some of the roots clearly have to do some fairly heavy lifting.

One of the examples the book actually gives is "la odia se", that is, "she
hates herself". (Also "las odia se" is "they hate themselves").

Me is the Novial word for "I".

Vu is the Novial word for "you". (In the singular; the plural is, intuitively
enough, vus.)

Thus, as best I can determine, "Me odia vu" is Novial for "I hate you". (And if
you want to be slightly more tsundere, "Me non odia vu" is "I don't hate you".)

More to follow, hopefully.