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A good insult can make people laugh for a few seconds. A great one can stick around for years and get repeated long after everyone has forgotten what started the argument. That’s when insulting someone turns into a real art form.
Calling it that is not much of an exaggeration. Humans have filled books and plays with insults, published academic papers on the subject, and even created laws around them. We have probably been taking verbal jabs at one another for as long as we have been able to speak.
The word “insult” itself has a pretty interesting origin. It traces back to the Latin salire, meaning “to leap.” The Latin word insultare meant “to leap at” and could describe an attack made with words.
Over time, “insult” became more closely connected to words intended to offend or humiliate someone. Long before the English language had a specific term for it, however, people were already finding creative ways to tear one another down.
One of the oldest surviving examples of insults comes from ancient Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, who are credited with developing one of the earliest writing systems, trained young scribes in schools where they spent years copying signs and passages onto clay tablets.
Some of those texts were much more entertaining than a basic writing exercise. In his book The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, scholar Samuel Noah Kramer describes one dating back to around 2000 BCE. Known as The Disputation Between Enkimansi and Girnishag, it follows two students trading increasingly bitter remarks.
The exchange goes like this:
Girnishag: “You dolt, numskull, school pest, you illiterate, you Sumerian ignoramus, your hand is terrible; it cannot even hold the stylus properly; it is unfit for writing and cannot take dictation. And yet you say you are a scribe like me.”
Enkimansi: “What do you mean I am not a scribe like you? When you write a document, it makes no sense. When you write a letter, it is illegible. [...] You are one of the most incompetent of tablet writers. What are you fit for, can anyone say?”
Girnishag: “Why, I am competent all around. [...] But you are the laziest of scribes, the most careless of men. When you do multiplication, it is full of mistakes. In computing areas, you confuse length and width. You chatterbox, scoundrel, sneerer, and bully.”
Clearly, trying to one-up your friends never goes out of style.
A few thousand years later, William Shakespeare was also crafting some unforgettable insults. Although we may know him best for his plays, sonnets, and enormous influence on the English language, he also had a gift for putting a character in their place with a single sentence.
For instance, in Richard III, Lady Anne tells Richard, “Out of my sight! Thou dost infect mine eyes.” His works also gave us wonderfully specific descriptions such as “three-inch fool,” “loathsome as a toad,” “eater of broken meats,” and “damned and luxurious mountain goat.”
As creative as insults can be, they have also caused serious trouble and even become crimes. One of these is lèse-majesté.
The term comes from the Latin phrase laesa majestas, meaning “injured majesty,” and refers to insulting or offending the dignity of a ruler or the state. The idea goes back to ancient Rome, where threats to the state or the emperor’s authority could bring severe punishment.
Similar laws later appeared across Europe, and all kinds of acts could be counted as lèse-majesté. Counterfeiting coins was one of them because copying money bearing the monarch’s image was seen as an offense against the crown.
