My Uncle Charlie used to turn to me whenever a politician was spouting on his old black and white television in the front room of his house on North Street. "As much use as a chocolate ironing board, kid" he'd say.
When the man with the trilby came to Uncle Charlie's house selling firewood, he'd say "He's here: The Man in the Iron Mac!" When my Auntie Gladys's Yorkshire puddings stubbornly refused to rise, Uncle Charlie would say: "If they're Yorkshire pudding
s, then I'm George Formby's ukulele case!" His ukulele case, note: not his ukulele. A chocolate ironing board, not the more common chocolate teapot. That's where Uncle Charlie's genius lay, in the choosing of the unusual word or image to make his insult hit the target unerringly and with an original slant.
Uncle Charlie would have liked Dr Robert Vanderplank, who has just published a book of "untranslatable insults, put-downs and curses from around the world".
The thing about the great insults is that they all display the kind of linguistic invention that Uncle Charlie employed. They're a kind of poetry, in a way. Take this one from Russia: "You're punching my brain like a bus ticket!" which is a very colourful way of saying, "You're doing my head in", or this one from Glasgow, said to a dreamy person who is sitting around with nothing to do: "Yer hanging aboot like a fart in a trance!"
Vanderplank organises the book geographically, and this gives us a chance to try to work out if insults and put-downs vary from country to country and if so, why.
The Italians, for example, have for years used the well-turned insult as a tool in the power game; indeed, the former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi published a book of insults called I Hate You, Berlusconi, containing some of the more colourful ones that had been aimed at him.
My favourite is their variation on the idea of having your cake and eating it: "You can't have a full barrel and a drunk wife."
Africa is good for curses and putdowns: there's an Igbo curse that translates as "May you die of uncontrollable running stomach" and, in Xhosa, the insult "undi qhela uboya wo-nodoli" means that someone is "as fickle as doll's hair" which I think has a certain limpid beauty, as opposed to the Rotherham phrase for someone who is a bit daft, "You doll's eead!" which has almost no limpid beauty at all.
In the Czech language, if you're a bit slovenly, they say that your coat "looks like it's been pulled from a camel's mouth" and, in Spain, if you can't quite see the point of something, they say that you "see less than three men on a donkey". My favourite is one that I've been trying to work into conversation for the last few weeks: "I wouldn't look at you with my bum."
Vanderplank's book emphasises our common humanity as in the end, all insults and put-downs follow certain accepted patterns: as he says, they're largely about "appearance and looks, about character and mood, about clumsiness and behaviour... about sexual prowess or lack of it".
Although we may miss the finer points, we don't half get the gist. And I'm going to try to follow Uncle Charlie's example and make my insults more customised. Next time somebody drives past and splashes me from a puddle, I'll shake my fist and shout: "You have the brains of the lid of a tin of tomato soup!" Hmm: not that good. Shame Uncle Charlie's not around any more.
Dr Robert Vanderplank
Boxtree, £9.99
