What Would You Consider An Insult To Your Spouse?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

OK I was watching I Love Lucy because, well get me a job and I’ll stop watching TV… :slight_smile:

Anyway, the Ricardos had moved from Manhattan to Connecticut (don’t you love the way I’m gonna tell you the whole back story though you’ve all seen the show a million times)

Lucy meets up with Betty Ramsey and they go shopping and Lucy spends over $3,000 to buy new furniture because she thinks the stock tags are prices. This is 1958 so…

So rather than tell Betty, that they can’t afford the new furniture she says she doesn’t think it’s right for the house, or as Betty says “Oh it doesn’t suit you.” To wit Lucy says “Yes,” and Betty says, “So what you’re saying is you don’t like my taste.” Betty had set up the shopping trip and got Lucy a discount and picked out most of the furniture.

So now the fight between neighbors starts with perdictable hillarious results.

Then when Ricky tries to go over and straighten it out, it gets worse. Ricky can’t admit he can’t afford the furniture and Betty’s husband played by Frank “Yessssss” Nelson, and him wind up in a fist fight over Lucy’s insulting Betty’s taste.

In the end it’s Ethel who straightens everything out by telling them, “The whole reason for this, is that the Ricardos simply can’t afford the furniture.”

So I finally get to the point by asking, first of all if someone implied that your wife (or husband or significant other) had bad taste, would you take that as an insult. I mean be insulted enough to get into a physical fight over. Ricky actually got pushed through the rose bushes :slight_smile:

Second, what would someone have to say to insult your significant other to make you really mad.

BTW this episode contains one of the funniest lines in the whole I Love Lucy series.

The Ramseys and the Ricardos are screaming at each other and Ethel interrupts them and says “Lucy aren’t you gonna introduce us?”

Lucy points to the Ramseys and says “These are our friends the Mertzes, meet our enemies the Ramseys” :smiley:

2

Gosh, I loved I Love Lucy. My favorite episodes were the chocolate factory, the loving cup stuck on Lucy’s head in the subway, when they went to Italy (stomping grapes) and the train trip out west. It was on TV in the 50s when I was a kid and I still laugh at the program when I see it. Timeless fun.

What was the question again??? :smiley:

Oh yeah… I need a job too.

3

My husband’s only real flaw is that he’s kind of a nerd. His friends tease him about that rather consistently. Hell, so do I. So I just can’t think of an insult that would really carry. He’s smart and kind, not really the sort of guy who makes enemies. And he does have horrible taste.

I think the only thing that would really piss me off is if someone attacked his character. I used to get angry when his relatives (who are filthy rich businessmen) would grill him about his career choices. They were really disappointed for a long time that he chose to go into the humble profession of clinical psychology. I bit my tongue a lot of times when they ridiculed him.

It’s interesting, people see my husband as a very mild-mannered, timid man. I remember when we got married, my family got to meet his family for the first time. They saw all these hard-core, flamboyantly wealthy, bossy Italian people in their designer dresses and suits. One of my uncles who witnessed this later said to me, ‘‘I never realized how hardcore Dom was until I met his relatives. Holy shit, his grandpa’s like the freakin’ Godfather. It takes some serious stones to be yourself in that kind of environment.’’

So other people may not know it, but I know he can take care of himself, and he lets that shit roll right off his back. He’s so comfortable with himself that I don’t view him as particularly vulnerable, therefore I wouldn’t need to feel insulted on his behalf.

As far as physical confrontations go, if somebody physically attacked my husband, I would throw down. I don’t care who you are.

4

I can’t think of an insult that would make me fighting mad, but if someone was out and out lying to other people, I might get steamed up about it, especially if it had to do with my SO’s honesty.

Other then that, a while ago I decided I didn’t want to be easily insulted. “If they are my friends, they didn’t mean it. If they aren’t my friends, why do I care.” That carries over to my SO.

5

I got a job and by the time tonight comes around I’ll have 65 hours in this week. Wish I could figure a way to share with Markxxx.

I can’t think of any words or insults that would automatically change my opinion of someone, or make me fighting mad, short of racist (or other “ist”) ones. Not even jokingly. That’s just the one thing I got a really thin skin for.

6

The racist ones are tough to handle…

7

My partner is Persian, and hates being called “Iranian.” His family came here before he was born, to escape all the crap going on there. The way they explain it, “Persian” is their ethnicity; “Iran” is the prison they escaped from.

So every now and then, someone will, jokingly, refer to him as “Iranian” or worse: “Ayatollah.” He knows they’re joking and laughs it off. I don’t think it’s funny.

He also has some very atypical body measurements that some people never tire of pointing out. Again, he takes it better than I do.

8

olives, thank you for providing me with the perfect segue into what I wanted to contribute to this discussion - without your post, this would be only tangentially related at best.

My wife (who is a non-geek) is usually very uneasy with the term “geek”, whereas I wear it as a badge of pride and something I clearly identify as. She says that when she was growing up it was a term of insult (almost like a racial epithet) and shouldn’t be something people call themselves. I remind her that that may have been the case back then, but (aside from schoolyard taunts (old habits die hard)) it’s being bandied about a lot in the past decade or so as at the least a neutral term, or at the most a term of pride. She counters with “you still have to watch who you say it to, as some might take offense at it”, my thoughts are that pretty much everyone who is a geek doesn’t mind the label (and those that aren’t wouldn’t mind being mistaken for someone who is stereotypically portrayed as uber-smart). I proudly call myself a geek, I use the term to describe others I think are geeks freely. So she might take real umbrage if someone called me a geek or nerd to her face, whereas I’d take it as a source of pride if someone called me it to my face. (If they called my wife it, I’d jsut disagree, since she is not a geek, rather than take umbrage.)

9

No problem–my post was also only tangentially related to the OP.

I consider ‘‘geek’’ an honorable term, personally. I believe there was a time when it was a really hurtful insult, but lately a lot of ‘‘geek’’ things, like the internet, technology, video games, etc. have moved into mainstream culture. It’s kind of cool to be geeky now. Also, when you become an adult, you can find people who share your interests and not give a god damn what others think about your hobbies.

I have no problem admitting I’m 40% nerd, 40% dork and 20% geek. In fact, when I’m having conversations with normal people (’‘So I was watching Battlestar Galactica last night…’’) and see their eyes start to glaze over, I’ll just say, ‘‘Yeah sorry. I’m kind of a nerd.’’

My husband is obsessed with the X-Men. He has eight enormous boxes filled with the comics. We were watching Heroes a while back, and one of the characters said, ‘‘blah blah… just like in issue #135 of the X-Men.’’ My husband, I shit you not, bolted out of his chair and said, ‘‘That’s not issue #135! That’s issue #142!’’ He then ran and got the materials to ‘‘prove it’’ to me.

What other description *is *there for that kind of behavior?

10

I’d get pretty het up if someone accused my husband of being something he was decidely NOT. Like considering he’s a great and fair boss, if a jerk implied that he was biased, that’d piss me right off. Or if another said he wasn’t compassionate when he’s got that in spades, well you get the idea.

11

Yeah, I think that’s pretty much how I feel. When you know someone that well, hearing people who don’t know WTF they’re talking about can be pretty upsetting.

12

So to put a bit of a specific twist on this thread.

Would you care if somene told you that your husband, wife or significant other had bad taste? Would that insult you?

13

No, I wouldn’t care at all if someone thought my husband had bad taste. That would just mean they had different taste, and there’s no accounting for taste.

Like several others have said, the only thing that would really upset me is if someone attacked his character. Although this is so ridiculous that I could hardly take it seriously. He is the goodest person you are likely to meet.

14

A neighbor once asked a friend of mine “how did you let (your wife) leave the house dressed like that? She looks like something out of a children’s picture book!”

After recovering from the bout of laughter, David said “setting aside the fact that it’s none of your business, you don’t know what day it is, do you? It’s Fat Friday and the teachers are putting up a play for the kids, she’s Alice. So I guess your remark was a compliment, but that doesn’t make you less of a meddling jackass.”

David is one of those guys who can leave you feeling like that bad taste in your mouth is from eating your own liver, raw (lawyer by training, car salesman by trade). The neighbor spent months not speaking to him except for a timid “good morning.” His anger wasn’t about the neighbor’s opinion, but about the meddling and about the assumption that he would “let” his wife dress however she fancies (other than “honey, your tags are showing” or helping her choose between A and B).

15

OK, where is it that those who have a Doper crush on olivesmarch4th meet again? I want to join them now.

Hell, I think I have a crush on your husband too!

16

Mrs. Homie is not afraid to stand up for herself if she’s insulted.

About the only thing that I would take exception to is if someone were blatantly hitting on her, despite me standing right there.

17

Exactly. I can ignore 99% of it, but my SO is of Chinese ethnicity, and I hate those stupid “Chinese language” jokes. He’s as American as they come, more so than me, and doesn’t even like China or have any connection to it.

Yet people think it’s funny to make those stupid jokes. And remember like 10 years ago when China had our spy plane? You would not believe the amount of flak he got for it. It still makes me a little mad when I think of how rude people were to him.

18

I can think of only one time I got “seeing red” angry over mein Herr, which happened in our small Baptist church we used to attend. He was on the pastoral search committee, and had worked an amazing amount of hours, along with several other people, looking for a new pastor. They had brought a candidate to trial-preach, and then we were having a vote/discussion. A group of …impolite people were griping about the fact that the candidate used to belong to another denomination, and implying that he was not spiritual enough because of that. Their blatant hypocrisy made me see red, and then someone had to go and say that the Methodists didn’t worship God properly, and that was probably why the committee didn’t pick a good candidate. As mein Herr was raised Methodist, that was directed at him. I rose a good three feet off my pew…and I’m not really sure what I said, but it involved him being good enough to slave hours away as their treasurer and deacon, but NO ONE was going to disparage my man…it sort of all blurs together after that.

19

That’s actually how the mrs. and I got together …

I think I’ve mentioned in another thread that my wife and I were a fix-up at a Halloween party by a mutual friend. I actually remember seeing my future wife walk in the door at the party for the first time and asking my friend if that was her - somehow I knew. Even though I was told that that was the fix-up, I was too nervous to go up to her and introduce myself.

A couple hours later in the party, I look over at my future wife (well, I probably was looking at her a lot of times during the night to that point) and an obviously drunken party-goer is trying to hit on her. Alarm bells started ringing in my head: “Oh no! What if they manage to get together before I even had a shot at her? I’ll never forgive myself!” So, I steeled up my courage and interrupted the conversatioin between the future mrs. and the drunk, and started my own conversation with her, the drunk slinked away.

I was happy because I got the girl, and she told me that she was happy because she wanted someone to save her from the drunk who she had no intention of hooking up with. :blush:

20

I once got ejected from a coed hockey game for fighting with a guy who was fighting with my spouse. This was a beginner-level league, but this guy took things a little too seriously. He’d fouled my spouse a couple of times, and the second time Spouse glared at him and said “Knock it off!” The guy jumped him, grabbed his helmet and tried to twist his head around.

I didn’t even think. I grabbed the guy by the scruff of his uniform jersey and yanked, trying to pull him off. Then the ref blew the whistle and I backed off, but that was enough to get me ejected for the rest of that game and the next one, for being the “third man in.”

The instigator got kicked out of the rest of the season, though, so it was worth it. Spouse didn’t even get a warning–nor should he. He didn’t even fight back when the guy jumped him (though he could have–he’s not exactly small and he was quite probably in better shape than the aggressor.)

So yeah, I’m pretty sure if somebody attacks my spouse, I’m gonna be right in there.