What interjections/insults have dropped out of fashion?

That came from Perry White, Clark Kent’s boss on the fifties TV show Superman. Your dad notwithstanding, I’ve never heard anyone say it in real life.

Which leads me to the next poster:

I believe that was cooked up by the writers of Welcome Back, Kotter for the Sweathogs (mainly Vinnie Barbarino/John Travolta) to say. It was a family-friendly version of “Stick it up your ass.”

Since Shakespeare’s already been brought up, how about some (non-racist) invective from Gone With the Wind?

Cad
Flighty, fast bit of baggage
Ninny
Mealy-mouthed
Scoundrel
Piddling, do-less good-for-nothing
Old peahen
Thing, as in “vile thing” and “low-down, cowardly, nasty, stinking thing”
(For that matter, “low-down” isn’t heard much anymore)

There’s also a moment when Scarlett’s too furious with Rhett to come up with something truly vile, so she shouts:
“You aren’t a gentleman!”
“Heel” was popular through the 1940s, at least, mostly for the kind of men previously called cads.

In my junior high school, “Your mother wears army boots” was often followed by “…and your father wears a bra!”

Fishwife!

“Jumpin’ Jehosaphat!”

Is that from a TV or movie character also?

Yeah, I think so. I seem to remember Gabby Hayes saying it and maybe Walter Brennan in the The Real McCoys, but I’m less sure about Brennan than I am about Hayes.

Ronnie Eckstine taught me that the correct pronunciation (ca. 1971) was “rat own”. Barry White must have taken lessons from Ronnie, too.

Rat own, rat own…

Apparently, calling a woman a “cat” used to be very insulting. I guess it still lives on in the adjective “catty” and the somewhat less common “cat house”, but I gather people used to refer to a woman as a “cat” when they wanted to be really mean. I have an old collection of jokes (from about 1949 or so) that has one with an elaborate build up to a bitchy woman at a restaurant ordering a glass of milk. One of her companions asks her, “wouldn’t you rather have that in a saucer?” Damn!

I must be older than I thought because I say that quite a bit.

Years an’ years an’ years ago I came across a book that was an anthology of stand-up routines from comics who were highly popular in the early '70s.* Gabe Kaplan had a routine in there; it was a Bill Cosby-like sketch featuring kids he knew growing up who clearly served as inspiration for the Sweathogs. The line “Up your hole with a Melorol” was used at least once in that sketch. (I still have no firm idea of what a Melorol actually is, although it appears to be some sort of ice cream.)

*The book was already well out-of-date by the time I read it, as Kotter wasn’t even in reruns on WLVI any more.

Cad, bounder, blackguard, scoundrel, knave, scallywag, rascal, swine, dog, dastard.

Most of these are still banned in the House of Commons, I think :stuck_out_tongue:

They didn’t invent it for Superman – it was at one time an actual mild interjection. Mark Twain has Horace Bixby, the pilot who taught him, use it in Life on the Mississippi. Given what he says elsewhere about Bixby’s language, though, I suspect that Twain was using euphemisms instead of repeating Bixby’s actual words. Nevertheless, Twain’s use of it shows that, at least by the 1870s (when he recorded this) the interjection existed.

Nobody says Ecastor! and Edepol! anymore. They were mild “women’s oaths” used in the time of the Caesars. I first learned of them in Colleen McCulloch’s books, but I’ve since come across them in my research. They’re likely appeals to Castor and Pollux. Appealks to them as the Gemini probably resulted in our mild oath Juminy (which I haven’t heard anybody actually use) and its “extended” form Jiminy Cricket(s) (which I haven’t heard either, outside the movies). I’ve long suspected the popularity of Jiminy Cricket as an epithet is due to his initials being “JC”.

Disney, of course, used the name for the character in Pinocchio. It’s worth noting that, in Collodi’s original a.) he’s just called “Cricket” and b.) Pinocchio jumps on him and squishes him.

He also used “You are a mental case” in a Dr. Jeckyl & Mr. Hyde sketch.

In the TV series Lois and Clark, they updated Perry White. Instead of “Great Ceasar’s Ghost”, he would say, “Great Shades of Elvis!”

’a Boo-Boo.

I think that was The Far Side.

I still use “say what?”.

I’ve gotta wonder if “nincompoop” is a bastardization of “non compis mentis”.

I’ve never heard “damn and blast”, but I’ve heard, occasionally use, “blast and tarnation”.

Amusing (to me, anyway) anecdote: When I was attending school (one of those vocational “business schools”) in '86 or '87, the seating in one of the classrooms was a bunch of long tables with three chairs at each. Before one class I was sitting at one of these tables, in the chair closest to the aisle; the other two chairs were vacant. One of the young ladies in my class approached my table intending to sit in one of the vacant chairs, but my own chair was too far back for her too squeeze through. So she said, “Aren’t you going to be a gentleman?” and I replied, “No, I’m going to be a cad!” (jokingly, of course - after pausing for comic effect I scooted my chair in to let her by). Now, I only had the most general notion of what “cad” meant, so when she asked me what it meant I decided to whip out my dictionary and look up the precise meaning. Which was, “An ungentlemanly character.” So it turned out I had used the word exactly correctly without even realizing it :stuck_out_tongue:

It sounds like even the book may have been censored. I heard the audio of that actual routine years ago on the radio, and what I heard was “Up your [bleep] with a Melorol”. Then again, the obvious meaning of “hole” in your cite may have been considered bleep-worthy by the radio station. (And admittedly, “ass” doesn’t rhyme with “Melorol”.)