Best put-down

[roger thornhill]

It's a competitive world and the virtual world is no different. Most of us like to establish ourselves in one way or another, whether as expert, wit, nice guy, ditzy guy, or even asshole.

So my question is what is the ultimate put-down with which to deal with that particular poster who gets under your skin. Okay, silence is the best weapon, so let's narrow it down to most effective verbal put-down, where 'verbal' means using words, as distinct from 'oral'. (Just to clear that up in line with one of the niches I crave for myself, linguist.)

To kick off, how about: "His spelling and grammar are serviceable"?

And, yes, that one's been directed at me on another board. Losers!

[START]

Hard to think of a put down but sarcasm is good and on a message board like this using spelling mistakes can be to your advantage.

[Mockingbird]

Originally Posted by roger thornhill

It's a competitive world and the virtual world is no different. Most of us like to establish ourselves in one way or another, whether as expert, wit, nice guy, ditzy guy, or even asshole.

So my question is what is the ultimate put-down with which to deal with that particular poster who gets under your skin. Okay, silence is the best weapon, so let's narrow it down to most effective verbal put-down, where 'verbal' means using words, as distinct from 'oral'. (Just to clear that up in line with one of the niches I crave for myself, linguist.)

To kick off, how about: "His spelling and grammar are serviceable"?

And, yes, that one's been directed at me on another board. Losers!

I find that almost anyone is offended by: 'Are you roger thornhill?'

Go fig.

[roger thornhill]

Originally Posted by START

On a message board like this using spelling mistakes can be to your advantage.

How so? Care to expand?

[roger thornhill]

Originally Posted by Mockingbird

I find that almost anyone is offended by: 'Are you roger thornhill?'

Go fig.

Ah, Mockers, you must belong to that statistically insignificant, but nonetheless vocal, minority that do not care for the work of Alfred Hitchcock. A generational thing, perhaps.

[Orville mogul]

Originally Posted by START

Hard to think of a put down but sarcasm is good and on a message board like this using spelling mistakes can be to your advantage.

I don't like it when people try to build themselves up by picking on others' spelling errors. That's just splitting hares.

[fireman]

Originally Posted by Endemic

I don't like it when people try to build themselves up by picking on others' spelling errors. That's just splitting hares.

I split some hares once. The trouble started when it was found that I used a beaver cleaver for the job.

[friedo]

Originally Posted by Endemic

I don't like it when people try to build themselves up by picking on others' spelling errors. That's just splitting hares.

Splitting hares is fine, as long as you have two hats.

[plnnr]

As Cecil so eloquently put it - "If stupid were cornflakes, you'd be General Mills."

[Orville mogul]

Originally Posted by friedo

Splitting hares is fine, as long as you have two hats.

Ha ha. fireman and friedo took my bate!

[Ghanima]

Your momma's so fat, somebody shouted Kool-Aid and she came bustin' through the wall.



Howzat?

[Knowed Out]

Dick and Jane is considered advanced reading for you, I see.

A roomful of monkeys can eventually type the Bible, but your goals are too high.

You don't correct your mistakes by putting white-out on the screen, you know.

[Ethilrist]

Four monkeys, seven days.

[Scumpup]

Your momma so fat that her favorite drink is gravy!

No, really, she so fat that she got her own area code!

Honest, she so fat that she wore her Malcolm X jacket and a helicopter landed on her!

[Kizarvexius]

[I, Claudius]

They say a snake bit her once. And died.

[/I, Claudius]

[World Eater]

Your momma is so fat her blood type is Ragu!

[START]

Originally Posted by roger thornhill

How so? Care to expand?

A good example might be something like this;

START your puntuation is horrible.

Well atleast I can spell PUNCTUATION.

Very mild but can never be rebutted...

Or if a person mispells a few words or even just one and they "insult" you...then say something along the lines of "I can't take someone seriously that can't even spell. Instead of trying to give me advice you should be learning how to spell..." then you would list the words the other poster spelled wrong.
Eventhough most likely it is an innocent mistake and the person does know how to spell, all is fair...
Also if you look at the hatemail for a website and the person who wrote the e-mail mispelled words usually the administrators will attack the spelling first and ignore the actual content of the letter...maybe I can come back with a website link later unless you know what i'm talking about.

[glee]

Winston Churchill is making a speech in the UK Parliament.

Woman: You're drunk!

Churchill: Yes madam. And you're ugly. However in the morning, I shall be sober.


I also seem to recall "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy!" (was it to Dan Quayle?)

[J. Me]

"Wow! That's the fastest I've ever hated anybody!"

I think I heard it on this board....

[roger thornhill]

Originally Posted by START

maybe I can come back with a website link later unless you know what i'm talking about.

I'm with you, START. Cheers!

[TVeblen]

As for verbal snarkiness, of course the ineffable Cecil ranks as a master. (The 'cornflakes' line...::wipes away a tear of appreciation::)

But a Dorothy Parker classic:

A luscious but callow Young Hussy runs into Dorothy Parker in a doorway at a formal gathering.

Hussy: (with a mocking wave) " Age before beauty!"
Dorothy Parker: "Pearls before swine. " ...said before smiling and sweeping through the doorway

Veb

[jellyblue]

Originally Posted by fireman

I split some hares once. The trouble started when it was found that I used a beaver cleaver for the job.

I wish you guys would stop splitting the hairs of the bush you're beating around...


How about: "you're not even interesting enough to make me sick"?

[Marley23]

Originally Posted by glee

I also seem to recall "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy!" (was it to Dan Quayle?)

By Lloyd Bentsen. "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

Spelling is perfectly okay to pick on in the right situation. In GD recently, I was told to stop being "nieve" about an issue. Twice. If that's not fair game, I don't know what is. All I wrote was "Don't use insults you can't spell," which I think is good advice on message boards and in life.

By the way, Cecil's great quote was actually "If ignorance were cornflakes, John, you'd be General Mills."

[Tentacle Monster]

Not one that I'd ever have occaison to use, but it's my favorite:

Jean Harlow: Why, you're Margott Asquith, aren't you?
Margot Asquith: No, my dear. The t is silent, like in Harlow.

[mike1dog]

He has delusions of adequacy.

[danceswithcats]

Originally Posted by jellyblue

I wish you guys would stop splitting the hairs of the bush you're beating around...

Why split hairs when they can be easily shaved?

Regarding sentence construction-[i]This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.[i/] Winston Churchill

[LifeOnWry]

Churchill was pretty good at put downs. Or he had a clever biographer. A lady whose title escapes me at the moment: "Winston, if I were your wife, I'd poison your coffee." Churchill: "Nancy, if I were your husband, I'd drink it."

Dorothy Parker had a jillion, too. My two favorites are (probably paraphrased) :"The problem with this book is that the covers are too far apart" and "As an actress, she displays the full gamut of emotions from A to B."

My friend Darren, about an annoying mutual acquaintance - "When you think that the molecules that went into making that guy could have been used for something USEFUL, like a couple hundred mosquitoes...."

Darren again about a twit: "He has the mind of an excruciatingly intelligent houseplant."

[Marley23]

Churchill's legendary insults, real or not, were supposedly exchanged with Lady Nancy Astor.

[InvidiousCourgette]

A recent salvo

Originally Posted by Liberal

you feckless hack

struck me as an effective put-down. Erudite, original and no face-saving humour.

[cornflakes]

Originally Posted by cornflakes

Considering how hacked up my alleged typing "style" is, I'm still waiting for somebody to reply to a post with

That's good, but it's still not Shakespeare. Let's give the next batch of monkeys their typewriters.

[ParentalAdvisory]

Originally Posted by START

Hard to think of a put down but sarcasm is good and on a message board like this using spelling mistakes can be to your advantage.

If the poster starts to use spelling and grammar mistakes as a put down without a follow up to the debate at hand, I usually find this to be the end of the debate. As well as pretty damn shallow. It's a lose lose for that kind of poster.

[Loopydude]

"[You are] not even wrong." - Wolfgang Pauli

[modro]

My favorite is a Bill Hicks Quote:

(to a Waffle House waitress who asked him why he was reading)

"I guess I read for a lot of reasons, the main one would probably be... So that I don't end up a fucking waffle waitress."

[levdrakon]

I'm hesitant to share this, as it's my favorite and I like to reserve it for those extra special occasions.

I swiped it from a newsgroup posting years ago. Wish I could credit the originator.

A putrescent mass, a walking vomit? Yes, you are a spineless little
worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk,
a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a
stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth.
You are a canker, an open wound. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be
seen with you. You took your last vacation in the Isles of Langerhan.

You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared
richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth
into a hostile world. You are an insensate, blinking calf,
meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling
beasts who sired you and then died of shame in recognition of what
they had done. They were a bit late.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same
species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf
at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut.
Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You
are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention
that you smell?

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up,
drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set
you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the
frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the
queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and
obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living
emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a
loathsome disease, a puerile slack-jawed drooling meatslapper. You
make Quakers shout and strike Pentecostals silent. Your mother
had to tie a pork chop around your neck just to get your dog to
play with you.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are
deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality
of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted.
You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and
sorrow wherever you go.

You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off,
pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john.
You clouted boggish foot-licking half-twit. You dankish clack-dish
plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You bloody churlish
boil-brained clotpole ponce. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup
pratting naff. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You gob-kissing
gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted
clapper-clawed flirt-gill.

You are so clueless that if we stripped you naked, soaked you in
clue musk, and dropped you into a field full of horny clues, You
still would not have a clue.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are
degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing
you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go
away.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard
stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it
goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension
of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid
collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed.
Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity
stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more
stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year.
Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our
universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial
fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence
of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the
laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an
epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me
again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride
your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant
trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.

Houston, and as we say in Texas, you couldn't pour water out of a boot
with instructions printed on the heel.

P.S.:
You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful,
cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable,
belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal,
fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic,
brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented,
lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic,
fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant,
clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb evasive,
double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative,
paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical,
cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant,
deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring,
plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious,
secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant,
self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, and
Generally Not Good.

[Shoeless]

[George Costanza]Oh yeah? Well, the Jerk Store called... they're running out of you![/GC]

One of my favorite Churchill put-downs was when some snooty old society dame accused him of being drunk, to which he replied, "My good lady, I may be drunk, but you're ugly, and I'll be sober in the morning!"

[InvidiousCourgette]

Originally Posted by levdrakon

I'm hesitant to share this, as it's my favorite and I like to reserve it for those extra special occasions.

I swiped it from a newsgroup posting years ago. Wish I could credit the originator.

Heh. Now that is good.

[Askia]

levdrakon. I can't believe I'm doing this, but... (Begins Cinematic Slow Clap)

Hee. My favorite bit: "If you were dropped naked in a field of horny clues, you still wouldn't have a clue."

Taken from real life at a Black College: Two students were in the middle of a very public break up on the dormitory steps, with like, 100 people looking on. After a long harangue, the guy says to the girl: "I know you're cheating, and one of these days I'll catch you with your pants down!"

Girl goes, "If you do, be sure you kiss my ass!"

[John Carter of Mars]

Originally Posted by Shoeless

[George Costanza]Oh yeah? Well, the Jerk Store called... they're running out of you![/GC]

One of my favorite Churchill put-downs was when some snooty old society dame accused him of being drunk, to which he replied, "My good lady, I may be drunk, but you're ugly, and I'll be sober in the morning!"

Shoeless, I kinda' like this one:
"It's better to read the whole thread before posting and be thought a fool than to fail to read it and remove all doubt."

[Rubystreak]

My all-time favorites come from Bette Davis. The feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford was legendary. She said of Joan, "I wouldn't piss on her if she were on fire." Classic. When asked why she was at her best when portraying bitches, she said, "Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies." Upon hearing that Joan Crawford was dead, she said, "You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good... Joan Crawford is dead. Good!"

[TommyTutone]

Hey! I don't go to where YOU work and knock the dick out of your mouth.

[Telperien]

I can't think of good put-downs. I tell myself it's because I can't be bothered to put that much effort into thinking about someone I despise.

But it's really because I just can't think of anything.

[Annie-Xmas]

The Dorothy Parker "pearls before swine" line has been discredited. It's not her style.

Some things she did say:

When informed that an actress was always kind to her inferiors: And where does she find them?

"Lady so-and-so knows 18 languages. And she can't say "no" in any of them."

[tygerbryght]

Originally Posted by levdrakon

I'm hesitant to share this, as it's my favorite and I like to reserve it for those extra special occasions.

I swiped it from a newsgroup posting years ago. Wish I could credit the originator.

I thought it looked familiar. It's known as The flame to end all flames.

I trust that you will bookmark the site, and in future give proper attribution?

[levdrakon]

Thanks for the link. But the Usenet group I got it from wasn't about computers, and it wasn't in response to "a legitamate question concering setting up a computer with huge amounts of memory and swap space."

It was towards the end of a long standing feud between two astrophysics geeks. So, if this Guy Macon is the author, my attribution would have been wrong anyway.

I just googled him, found his website, then this:

ABOUT THE INSULT FILE::

This document is a collection of insults gathered from many years of
BBS and Usenet use, so the real credit goes to the many fine flamers
who have had their work added to this document over the years. I am
but an editor who has gathered the works of others into one document.

<then>

PERMISSIONS:

You are free to use this for any purpose, including web pages,
newsgroup posts, emails, and letters to the Los Angeles Times. I do
*not* require you to give me credit if you use this in an email or
newsgroup post - it is more effective without it. Just cut and past it
as is, tell anybody who asks where you got it, and refer them to this
paragraph if they think you stole it.

<then>

Now that the file has become popular, there are many hacked-up and
outdated versions of it floating around the 'Net. If you see one,
please let people know that they can always find the latest version
at [ HTTP://WWW.GUYMACON.COM/FUN/INSULT/INDEX.HTM ].

[Dragwyr]

Here is my favorite:

"I'm sure whatever it is you have has a long, Latin sounding name."

[Loopydude]

I kinda liked that line, delivered by Harvey Keitel as The Wolf, in Pulp Fiction:

"Well, let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet."

Sort of a warning against overconfidence, I suppose.

[Spoonbender]

Supposedly this was an exchange between composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and...someone else.

"Why do people take an instant dislike to me?"
"It saves time."

Then there was Roger Ebert's put-down of Vincent Gallo, director of The Brown Bunny, which Ebert saw at the Cannes Film Festival and made some very disparaging remarks about. Gallo insulted Ebert for being fat, and Ebert replied:

"It is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny."

[Annie-Xmas]

/Forbidden Broadway, to the tune of "Memory."

Hate me
People instantly hate me.
Alan Lerner once told me.
It's because it saves time.

The story's been told about other people.

Someone once insisted that author Issac Asimov was someone else, and he finally said "No, I'm Truman Capote." To which the person replied "Mr. Capote. I never would have recognized you. You look so much more masculine on television."

[Ethilrist]

Originally Posted by TVeblen

As for verbal snarkiness, of course the ineffable Cecil ranks as a master. (The 'cornflakes' line...::wipes away a tear of appreciation:

But a Dorothy Parker classic:

A luscious but callow Young Hussy runs into Dorothy Parker in a doorway at a formal gathering.

Hussy: (with a mocking wave) " Age before beauty!"
Dorothy Parker: "Pearls before swine. " ...said before smiling and sweeping through the doorway

Veb

I've had that one cued up and waiting for years...

[Ethilrist]

Originally Posted by Tentacle Monster

Not one that I'd ever have occaison to use, but it's my favorite:

Jean Harlow: Why, you're Margott Asquith, aren't you?
Margot Asquith: No, my dear. The t is silent, like in Harlow.

Ouch. Freakin' ouch.