Why Gen Y and prisoners are using rude Shakespeare insults

Glen Le Lievre

A friend recently attended an online vertebrate palaeontology conference where the automatic censor blocked anyone from using the word “bone”. Meat scaffolding it is!

I often find myself thinking about the role music, lyrics and words in general have in our daily lives. It’s more than we give them credit for.

Take this quote from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin.

“So in some sense,” he told The Guardian, “I do think melodies can do a lot. It would be interesting to see how the world would be different if Dick Cheney really listened to Radiohead’s OK Computer. I think the world would probably improve. That album is f..king brilliant. It changed my life, so why wouldn’t it change his?” Exactly!

So too with video games. “If you are obsessed with this pandemic, you need to find ways to distract yourself,” Dr Edna Foa, a professor in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the world’s leading experts in anxiety and trauma, told the NY Times earlier this year. “We are in the middle of the trauma, not post-stress,” she said, highlighting that during a crisis we needed to take breaks and soothe ourselves.

Foa pointed to a study that found playing Tetris in the emergency room after a car accident appeared to reduce the development of traumatic memories. A spin on the theory used by five jurors during a 2008 Sydney drugs trial, when they played sudoku during court. The jurors claimed they concentrated better while playing puzzles. But after more than 100 witnesses, the trial was abandoned.

Creativity is an underrated distraction. Perhaps because it’s getting harder and harder to do from home. For example, American Gen X icon Megan Jasper. As a 25-year-old record rep at Caroline Records in Seattle, she fielded a call from the New York Times about grunge in 1991. And gave them a bunch of fake lingo. Which was published as real.

Wack slacks = old ripped jeans. Fuzz = heavy wool sweaters. Plats = platform shoes. Kickers = heavy boots. Swingin on the flippity-flop = hanging out. Bound and hagged = staying home on Friday and Saturday night. Harsh realm = bummer. Cob nobbler = loser. Tom-tom club = uncool outsiders. Rock on = a happy goodbye.

Imagine having that spontaneous innovation! It beats the lingo I recently overheard — a 20 something who punctuates sentences and silences with “yum” and another who has perfected the “duh” from Billie Elish’s Bad Guy.

Luckily, British prisoners are picking up the linguistic slack. Inmates are being encouraged to swear at guards using the Bard’s barbs to avoid getting, how shall we put it, “banged up”.

Rather than traditional insults starting with C and F and B, theatre group London Shakespeare Workout is teaching convicts at Pentonville jail to substitute new taunts. For example … How to tell someone they stink? “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril” (Merry Wives of Windsor). Or that you want them dead? “Would thou wouldst burst!”

A classic appearance based bibe: “You poor, base, rascally, cheating lack-linen mate” (Henry IV Part II).

The Shakespearean equivalent of a “I slept with your mum” probe: “Villian, I have done thy mother” (Titus Andronicus) or “My wife’s a hobby horse!” (A Winter’s Tale). “Thou sodden-witted lord! Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows,” is a jibe for a drunk.

Hopefully prison dramas will pick up the syntax slack and start using “cream-faced loon”; “onion-eyed hedgepig”, “pribbling bum-baily”, and “starveling, you elfskin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish!”.

Here’s a few ideas we prepared earlier: “Like the toad; ugly and venomous” (As You Like It); “Thou art as fat as butter” (Henry IV); “Your brain is as dry as the remainder biscuit after voyage” (As You Like It); “You are as a candle, the better burnt out” (Henry IV Part II); “Thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!” (Richard III); “Thou art unfit for any place but hell” (Richard III); “I’ll beat thee, but I would infect my hands” (Timon of Athens).

Or you could always keep things simple with a classic from Henry IV: “Peace, ye fat guts!”