cockwomble
Jan. 22nd, 2024 07:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordTheme 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.
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.
