Trentino: I did not come here to be insulted. Firefly: That's what you think. —Duck Soup
In an age when the uptight are continually exhorted to let it all hang out and be in touch with their feelings, it is curious that no one calls anyone else a Byzantine logothete any more. That is what Teddy Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson; and, while a Byzantine logothete is not the worst thing you can say about someone—it means a glorified accountant—it does suggest a certain largesse of contempt that is missing from modern life. A government official is fired from a high post and he cites "personal differences" with his superior. An actress is savaged in a gossip column, and she "resents" it. Mighty civilized behavior. To be sure, these people do not mean a tepid word they say. Deep in their smoking hearts what they yearn to shout is that the former boss and the gossip columnist are the putrescence of the earth, that they have the grace of herring, the brains of rock stars, that their faces would sink a fleet. They do not say so, of course. Instead, their minds flee their true feelings like panicked belles, skittering over perfectly decent invectives, settling finally on the gray ruins of politeness.
It is not that insults have disappeared entirely from modern discourse, but they have been reduced to the most elementary forms of abuse, and to the least poetic occasions. Once in a while one feels the sweet spray of curses in a traffic jam or at a ball game, for example, and is momentarily uplifted, but it is mere rudeness, and rudimentary. Fortunately, we still have the old movies to turn to:
Peter Lorre: You despise me, don't you? Humphrey Bogart: Well, if I gave you any thought, I probably would.
Otherwise all is indirection—the professor who refers to his "learned colleague" (meaning "fool") or the Congressman who defers to "the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey" (meaning "crooked fool"). There simply are no great insults any more; what was an art has become a shambles.
The odd thing is that it was not so long ago that the art of the insult was in its heyday. Winston Churchill was a virtuoso at it, calling Clement Attlee "a sheep in sheep's clothing" when he was not calling him "a modest little man with much to be modest about." Then there was this famous exchange:
Lady Astor: Winston, if you were my husband I should flavor your coffee with poison. Churchill: Madam, if I were your husband I should drink it.
That was a good deal kinder than the night Bessie Braddock M.P. berated Churchill for being drunk. Churchill replied that in the morning he would be sober, but she would still be ugly.
The English have always been especially adept at this sort of verbal violence, perhaps because they are an island people and have learned to hold familiarity in contempt. Disraeli on Gladstone, for example: "He has not a single redeeming defect." Gladstone, in fact, brought out the best in his antagonist.