cockwomble

[prettygoodword]

Theme week! *rubs hands* One I've been looking forward to for a few weeks: colorful British insults. Some are also used in other dialects, such as Ireland and Australia, but the locus is the United Kingdom and the focus is very much on the colorful -- witness the delightful:


cockwomble (KOK-WOM-buhl) - (UK & Ireland) n., an obnoxious and contemptable person.


Coined relatively recently, as in probably this century. This is one of a class of insults now called shitgibbons, which was coined as an insult in 1990 and repurposed as a linguistics term in 2017 by linguist Taylor Jones, for a type of compound-word insult consisting of a single-syllable expletive + an absurd/innocuous two-syllable (usually trochaic) noun -- other examples include buttmonkey, scumbucket, and twatwaffle. In this case, the innocuous noun is Womble, a fictional creature created by children's book writer Elisabeth Beresford, after her daughter's mispronunciation of Wimbledon as Wombledon.

---L.

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

…The feminine would presumably be “twatwomble”? (Or “henwomble”, should you want to take an archly scientific route.)

According to a possibly apocryphal story, the Wombles TV show had an unintended consequence. The Wombles made their living by upcycling human refuse into ingenious inventions; in hopes of sighting them, kids would leave offerings of trash in the woods—kind of defeating the franchise’s relentless ecological message.

(My source was a comment thread on We Hunted The Mammoth, which has since gone down—apologies for my inability to provide a cite.)

[prettygoodword]

For euphony, I suspect instead it's cuntwomble.

[lokifan]

For me personally, the vibe of cockwomble is that it probably doesn't really have a female equivalent. But maybe that's because I associate it so strongly with Boris Johnson, including his misogyny and the shambling carelessness that a woman would never get away with.

[prettygoodword]

Heh. Fair. More than.

[med_cat]

Hehe ;)

[prettygoodword]

:glances suspiciously around: