Gargantua and Pantagruel
As usual, I will quote from Michael Quinion’s irreplaceable World Wide Words column, this time from issue 348 (Saturday 5 July 2003):
“English, whatever its other merits, has as many disparaging words
as one would possibly desire. The example that follows is from Sir
Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais’ work Gargantua and
Pantagruel, a translation that draws heavily on vocabulary used in
Scotland in his [Urquhart’s] time:
“The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable
to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them
most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous
gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed
scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers,
slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts,
cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering
companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks,
scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs,
idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish
grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish
loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers,
lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock
slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons,
turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory
epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat
of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves
with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown
household loaf.”
Have fun working all of these into casual sentences, or just tracking down the meanings of all these insults. I’ll get you started: a sychophant-varlet is a servile, flattering servant or rascal. A blockish grutnol is a dull, lazy person.&nbp; A woodcock slangam is a lanky person as dim-witted as a pheasant (Google for slangam and you encounter a fascinating academic paper entitled A cultural-linguistic study of English sound-symbolic pejorative lexemes beginning in sl- and du-. As long as you have your dictionary out already, it’s worth a read: just look for definitions that begin ‘Ling. -‘.) A doddipol-jolthead seems to be a blockhead-blockhead, which suggests that there has been a great deal of linguistic compression of various insults into fewer terms. I have the misfortune of encountering quite a few drunken roysters (revelers), drowsy loiterers, and jeering companions, and I am commonly treated as a paltry customer, although less frequently since the local Wherehouse Music stores have closed. I have been mostly able to avoid staring clowns and forlorn snakes. Just apply some effort: I’m sure you can work shite-a-bed scoundrel into today’s conversations with minimal effort.
The source work for these words, Gargantua and Pantagruel, inspired the English word Gargantuan, which is defined by one source as “Characteristic of Gargantua, a gigantic, wonderful personage; enormous; prodigious; inordinate.” The author, François Rabelais (1494-1553), has also given rise to an English word, Rabelaisian, used to describe wildly obscene humor (take, for instance, Gargantua’s discussion of how best to wipe one’s arse, the final decision being the neck of a live goose, leading me to wonder if a few centuries will turn South Park into fine literature.) If this is intriguing to you, BookFinder lists a range of copies of Gargantua, from a $0.50 Penguin mass market paperback to a charming 1708 octavo edition, containing the translation above, in calfskin with gilt lettering for £1100 (about $1800.) If you beat me to it you can have a $50 limited edition on hand-made paper; I’m checking to see if it contains Urquhart’s translation.
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April 26th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
It contained Urquhart’s translation, and nobody beat me to it. I bought it, then forgot I bought it, then regretted having not bought it when I went looking for it again, then found it on my bookshelf.