Forgotten Insults From the 1700s: Georgian Put-Downs Worth Bringing Back
Calling someone an idiot is fine, but it's a bit flat, isn't it? The Georgians had far better options. If your neighbour was fat and lazy, she was a fussock. If your boss was a tight-fisted miser, he was a muckworm. If some bloke in a tight waistcoat was showing off down the pub, he was a twiddlepoop, and if he was just plain thick, he was a jolterhead.
Most of these words have been dead for two hundred years. We only know about them because two very different men in the 1700s decided to write down how English was actually spoken, one of them from a library and the other from the gin shops and back alleys of London.
Quick Answers
● Where do 18th-century insults come from? Mostly from two dictionaries: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785).
● What's the funniest 1700s insult? Gundiguts, for a fat person, and twiddlepoop, for a dandyish, effeminate-looking man, are strong contenders.
● Did Georgians really use these words? Many of them turn up in plays, novels and letters of the period, not just in dictionaries.
● Are any still used today? A handful survived, like nincompoop and chucklehead, but most died out by the early 1800s.
● What was the most famous insult of the 1700s? Probably the Earl of Sandwich telling someone they'd die on the gallows or of the pox, though who actually got the famous comeback is disputed.
The Two Men Who Saved Georgian Slang
Samuel Johnson published his great Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. It was a monumental piece of work, but it was also a respectable one. Johnson wanted to fix the language and give it some dignity, which meant most of the rude, street-level stuff people actually said got left out. Not all of it, though. As we'll see, Johnson had a sharp tongue of his own.
Thirty years later, a very different man set out to fill the gaps. Francis Grose was a former militia officer and paymaster who'd inherited a fortune and then lost most of it. According to linguist Tony Thorne's profile of him, he kept the regiment's accounts stuffed in his pockets rather than in any proper ledger, which tells you most of what you need to know about his approach to money. He later reinvented himself as an antiquary and artist, publishing well-regarded books of drawings of Britain's old buildings.
He was also enormous, and he didn't mind people saying so. His friend Robert Burns described him as "a fine, fat, fodgel wight", which roughly translates as a fine, fat, dumpy fellow. Grose loved it. In 1785 he published A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Instead of reading other people's books, Grose and his assistant Tom Cocking went out at night into London's slums, docks and taverns and listened to sailors, soldiers, thieves and beggars. The result was a dictionary packed with exactly the kind of words Johnson had turned his nose up at. The Public Domain Review notes it's been described as a stand against censorship, and Grose himself argued in the preface that British liberty gave the language of ordinary people "a force and poignancy" you wouldn't find under tyrannies. It went through new editions in 1788 and 1796 and was reworked after his death as the Lexicon Balatronicum in 1811.
Grose died suddenly in Dublin in 1791, struck down by a fit at the dinner table. He left behind the best record we've got of how the Georgians really insulted each other.
Insults for People Who Weren't Very Bright
Jolterhead. A fool, a blockhead, someone with a big thick head and not much going on inside it. It's an old one. Green's Dictionary of Slang traces it back to Shakespeare, who has a character called a jolthead in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and it was still going strong in the 1700s, when Laurence Sterne used it. It's got a lovely clunky sound to it, which is the whole point.
Bufflehead. Another word for a fool, with buffle-headed meaning confused or stupid. Grose included buffle-headed in his first edition in 1785. The word probably comes from buffle, an old word for a fool, or possibly the Dutch buffel, a blockhead. Samuel Pepys was already using it in his diary in 1668, calling one man the biggest knave and bufflehead he'd ever seen, according to Green's.
Dog booby. An awkward lout or a clumsy country bumpkin. Grose defined it in his 1785 edition as a clodhopper. It's worth reviving purely because it sounds so ridiculous out loud.
Fopdoodle. Straight out of Johnson's dictionary, where it means a fool or an insignificant wretch. The fop part is a vain, showy man and the doodle part is an old word for a simpleton. Put them together and you've got someone who's both vain and useless, which covers a lot of people.
Nincompoop. This one survived, but its 1700s meaning was a bit different. Grose spelled it nickumpoop and used it for a fool, and especially a hen-pecked husband. He also offered a very rude explanation of where it came from. According to Green's Dictionary of Slang, Grose suggested it described a man who'd never seen his own wife naked, though he also floated a tamer theory that it was a mangled version of the Latin non compos, as in not of sound mind. Nobody really knows.
Insults for the Fat and the Clumsy
The Georgians weren't big on body positivity, and they had plenty of words to prove it.
Gundiguts. A fat, wheezy fellow. It's older than Grose, turning up in a 1690s dictionary of criminal slang, and Green's records Dr John Arbuthnot throwing it at someone as a direct insult in his 1712 satire The History of John Bull. It was still in Grose in 1785. Given the size of Grose himself, you have to wonder whether he wrote that entry with a bit of a smile.
Gollumpus. A big, clumsy, loutish man, the kind who knocks over the furniture every time he stands up. Green's suggests it might come from a Scottish word, golamus, meaning large and unshapely. Grose kept it in all three of his editions.
Fussock. A lazy, fat woman, or in the phrase old fussock, a frowsy old woman. It comes from Yorkshire dialect and was being used as early as 1698, when a slang dictionary defined it in rather cruder terms. Green's shows it hung around for a long time. An Irish publication in 1812 described a city fussock waddling her way to a grand house, and it turns up in a Kate Atkinson novel in 1995 as fuzzock.
Duke of limbs. A tall, awkward, badly put-together man, all elbows and knees. It's in the original 1785 edition, the copy of which now sits in the British Library, as Atlas Obscura found when it went to have a look. The idea of giving a gangly lad an aristocratic title for his lack of coordination is a very British kind of cruelty.
Insults for the Scruffy, the Stingy and the Sneaky
Shabbaroon. A ragged, shabby, down-at-heel person, or a mean-spirited one. It comes from shabby, and it's been knocking around since at least 1675, when it appeared in a list of underworld slang. Green's notes it even crossed the Atlantic, where a writer used it in the 1830s while having a go at Andrew Jackson.
Captain Queernabs. A shabby, badly dressed man. Queer was criminal slang for bad or counterfeit, and the captain bit is pure sarcasm. It's in the 1785 Grose.
Muckworm. A miser, someone who grubs around after money like a worm in the dirt. It was a popular one in the 1700s. Green's Dictionary of Slang points out that Jonathan Swift even named a character Sir Peter Muckworm in his Polite Conversation in 1738. Perfect for the relative who never gets a round in.
Slubberdegullion. Johnson defined this glorious mouthful as a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch. It's a 17th-century word that was still hanging on in his day, and it's probably the single most satisfying insult on this list to say out loud.
Backfriend. Another Johnson gem, and an oddly modern idea. A backfriend is someone who acts like your mate to your face but is secretly your enemy. We'd say frenemy now, which is a much worse word.
Garlickeater. Johnson defined this, rather unfairly to garlic, as a mean fellow.
Insults for Fops, Show-Offs and Wannabe Wits
Twiddlepoop. An effeminate-looking man, or as we might put it now, someone who's a bit too pleased with his outfit. According to Green's, it appears in Grose's own handwritten notes from around 1786 and made it into print in the 1796 third edition. It comes from twiddle, to twirl, and poop, which meant exactly what you think it did.
Witling. Johnson's word for a pretender to wit, a man of petty smartness. Every office has one. He's the bloke who thinks he's funny.
Airling. Another from Johnson, meaning a young, light, thoughtless, gay person, gay here meaning flighty and fun-loving. It's the kind of word your nan might use about someone's new boyfriend.
Kittle pitchering. Not strictly a name for a person, but too good to leave out. It was the Georgian art of wrecking someone's long, boring story by constantly interrupting, asking pointless questions and contradicting the little details until they gave up. Every family has a kittle pitcherer. Most families need one.
Macaroni: The Insult Hidden in Yankee Doodle
If you've ever wondered why Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni, the answer is one of the great 18th-century insults.
In the 1760s, rich young Englishmen came back from the Grand Tour of Europe with a taste for Italian food and outrageous fashion, and they formed what became known as the Macaroni Club. According to Atlas Obscura's history of the macaronis, they wore towering wigs, tight breeches, short coats, striped stockings and gaudy shoes, and carried fancy walking sticks. At first, macaroni meant sophisticated and worldly. By the 1770s it had flipped into an insult for a man who'd taken fashion way too far, and critics had a field day accusing them of being neither properly male nor female. The printseller Mary Darly built a thriving business selling caricatures of them.
That's where the song comes in. British soldiers mocked the scruffy American colonists as Yankee doodles, and doodle, as History.com explains, meant a fool or simpleton, the same doodle as in Johnson's fopdoodle. The joke was that a colonial bumpkin thought sticking one feather in his hat made him a fashionable macaroni. After Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill in 1775, the Americans stole the song and turned it into an anthem of defiance, which is about the best revenge anyone's ever taken on an insult.
An Insult for the Servants
Georgian Britain was obsessed with class, and the slang reflected it. Servants got some of the harshest nicknames of all.
Catch fart. A footboy, the servant who walked behind his master or mistress. Grose explains in his 1785 entry that it was because they followed so closely behind. You can work out the rest.
The Really Rude One
We can't do a list of Grose's insults without at least one that makes you wince. Rantallion was his word for a man whose scrotum hung lower than his penis. Green's Dictionary of Slang notes that Grose explained it with a firearms comparison, likening it to a gun whose shot pouch is longer than its barrel. Why this needed its own word is anyone's guess, but Grose clearly thought it did, and it stayed in every edition right through to 1823.
Johnson's Own Put-Downs
For a respectable lexicographer, Samuel Johnson could be spectacularly rude, and some of his best insults are hidden inside ordinary definitions. His dictionary, as collected by Johnson scholar Jack Lynch, defines a patron as "a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery". He had his reasons. He'd been let down badly by his own would-be patron, Lord Chesterfield.
He also had a dig at women in politics with statueswoman, a woman who meddles in public affairs, which he flagged as a term of contempt. And he could be plain nasty, defining a blowze as a ruddy, fat-faced wench. Not his finest moment.
Pope and the Art of the Literary Takedown
The poet Alexander Pope turned insulting his rivals into a full-length book. When the scholar Lewis Theobald criticised Pope's edition of Shakespeare, Pope responded in 1728 with The Dunciad, a mock-epic poem crowning Theobald the king of dunces and throwing in dozens of other writers he couldn't stand for good measure.
According to Britannica's account of the poem, Pope kept expanding it for years, adding a load of fake scholarly footnotes in 1729 so he could insult people in the margins too. When the poet laureate Colley Cibber had a go at him in 1742, Pope simply swapped Theobald out and made Cibber the new king of the dunces in the final 1743 version. It's the 18th-century equivalent of editing an old post to have a dig at your new enemy.
The Most Famous Comeback of the Century (That Probably Wasn't His)
John Wilkes was a radical MP, a notorious rake and famously one of the ugliest men in London. His great enemy was John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich, the man the sandwich is named after. In 1763 Sandwich stood up in the House of Lords and read out Essay on Woman, an obscene parody poem Wilkes had helped write, to get him condemned, as History Today recounts. The fact that Sandwich and Wilkes had been fellow members of a notorious drinking club made the betrayal even juicier.
The story goes that Sandwich once told Wilkes he'd end up either on the gallows or dying of the pox, and Wilkes shot back: "That must depend on whether I embrace your lordship's principles or your mistress." It's often held up as one of the best comebacks ever made.
Unfortunately, it probably wasn't Wilkes. Quote Investigator tracked down the earliest printed version, from The European Magazine in 1784, and there the comeback belongs to the actor and comic playwright Samuel Foote, sparring with Sandwich. Wilkes's name doesn't get attached to it until 1828, long after all three men were dead. It's since been pinned on everyone from the actor James Quin to Disraeli. Great insults, it turns out, get passed around nearly as much as old slang.
When an Insult Could Land You in Court
Calling someone a name in the 1700s wasn't just rude. It could get you sued. Church courts still handled defamation cases, and the insults that landed people there were mostly about sex.
Historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala, in his study of honour and reputation in the period, found that whore, rogue and cuckold were the big three. For a woman, being called a whore in the street could wreck her marriage prospects, her business and her standing with the neighbours, so plenty of women went to law to clear their names. The courts of Middlesex and Westminster alone were dealing with more than a hundred defamation cases a year between 1660 and 1725.
Women were such frequent litigants that historian Tim Meldrum titled his study of the Bishop of London's court between 1700 and 1745 A Women's Court in London. The usual punishment for the loser wasn't a fine but public penance, which often meant standing up in church and admitting you'd lied.
As the century went on, these cases died away. Robert Shoemaker's research on public shaming in 18th-century London shows street insults gradually lost their power as people turned to newspapers and print to attack or defend reputations instead. Which is to say, the Georgians invented the online pile-on about 250 years early.
Why These Insults Disappeared
Slang is fast fashion. Most of Grose's words were already on the way out when the Lexicon Balatronicum appeared in 1811, and by the Victorian era a lot of them only survived in dictionaries. The Victorians also got much more squeamish about print, which didn't help words like catch fart or rantallion.
But some of them got away. Nincompoop and chucklehead are still with us, and plenty of Grose's other entries, like kick the bucket, made it into everyday English. Georgian drinking culture gave us a whole vocabulary of its own too, as anyone who's read about the 18th-century gin craze will know. Grose recorded gin as blue ruin and strip me naked.
Language keeps doing this, picking up new words and dropping old ones. The trenches of the First World War gave us a whole new batch, and some First World War slang we still use today feels just as natural now as Grose's words once did.
So next time someone cuts you up on the motorway, don't reach for the usual. Call them a gollumpus. They won't know what's hit them.
