listen I’ll cover your bones with black flint
listen I’ll cover your bones with black feathers
listen I’ll cover your bones with black rocks
Because you’re going where it’s empty
Black coffin out on the hill
listen the black earth will hide you, will
find you a black hut
Out where it’s dark, in that country
listen I’m bringing a box for your bones
A black box
A grave with black pebbles
listen your soul’s spilling out
listen it’s blue.
Cherokee Indian chant designed to bring about the death of a victim, adapted by Jerome Rothenberg, Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees
May you dig up your Father by moonlight and make soup of his bones.
Fiji islands curse
Cursed by your mother’s anus
Cursed by your father’s testicles.
Yoruba verbal duelling, quoted by Chief Oludare Olajuba, References to Sex in Yoruba Oral Literature
I shit on the balls of your dead ones.
Spanish gypsy insult
Copulate with my Father who is dead!
Admiralty Islands’ most unpardonable insult
I shit in your Mother’s milk.
Spanish insult
Copulate with your wife.
Trobriand Islands’ most unpardonable insult
I hope that your piles hang like a bunch of grapes.
Greek insult directed at homosexuals
I shit on your Father’s nose.
Farsi (Iranian) insult
I shit on God, on the cross, and on the carpenter who made it (and on the son of the whore who planted the pine)!
Catalan insult
May a fart be on your beard.
Farsi insult for men
May the devil damn you to the stone of dirges, or to the well of ashes seven miles below hell; and may the devil break your bones! And all my calamity and harm and misfortune for a year on you!
Curse from the Cois Fharraige, west of Galway City, in Connemara
I’ll stick a pig’s leg up your cunt until your back-teeth rattle.
Japanese insult
A donkey’s head in your cunt.
Farsi insult used by a woman to call another stupid
Your Grandmother on roller-skates.
Central American curse
Your Grandmother in trousers.
Central American curse
A plague o’ both your houses!
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
For him that stealeth a Book from this Library, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with Palsy, and all his Members blasted. Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy and let there be no sur-cease to his Agony till he sink in Dissolution. Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final Punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever and aye.
Curse Against Book Stealers, Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona
Roger Fuckebythenavel.
Earliest recorded use of the word ‘fuck’ in English – an offensive nickname for a man outlawed in 1311
Die, may he; Tiger, catch him, snake bite him; Steep hill, fall down on him; Wild boar, bite him.
Curse of Toda tribe in southern India
Woe unto bloody Lichfield!
George Fox, founder of the Quakers, after a dream in which he saw the town engulfed in blood
Thou cursed cock, with thy perpetual noise,
May’st thou be capon made, and lose thy voice,
Or on a dunghill may’st thou spend thy blood,
And vermin prey upon thy craven brood;
May rivals tread thy hens before thy face
Then with redoubled courage give thee chase;
May’st thou be punished for St Peter’s crime,
And on Shrove Tuesday perish in thy prime;
May thy bruised carcass be some beggar’s feast –
Thou first and worst disturber of man’s rest.
Sir Charles Sedley on a cock at Rochester
I charm thy life
From the weapons of strife,
From stone and from wood,
From fire and from flood,
From the serpent’s tooth,
And the beasts of blood:
From Sickness I charm thee,
And Time shall not harm thee;
But Earth which is mine,
Its fruits shall deny thee;
And Water shall hear me,
And know thee and fly thee;
And the Winds shall not touch thee
When they pass by thee,
And the Dews shall not wet thee,
When they fall nigh thee:
And thou shalt seek Death
To release thee, in vain;
Thou shalt live in thy pain
While Kehama shall reign,
With a fire in thy heart,
And a fire in thy brain;
And Sleep shall obey me,
And visit thee never,
And the Curse shall be on thee
For ever and ever.
Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama
you are the dumbest thing
on the earth the slimiest
most rotten thing in the universe
you motherfuckin germ
you konk-haired blood suckin punks
you serpents of pestilence you
samboes you green witches gnawing the heads of infants
you rodents you whores you sodomites you fat
slimy cockroaches crawling to your holes
with bits of malcolm’s flesh
i hope you are smothered
in the fall of a huge yellow moon.
Welton Smith on black people who failed to support Malcolm X, The Nigga Section
Sadaam, oh Sadaam
Thou flesh-knotter you
Claim not to be Muslim
For you are truly a Jew
Your deeds have proved ugly
Your face is darkest black
And we will set fire
To your bottom and your back.
Poem on Sadaam Hussein, broadcast on Saudi television during the Gulf War
Son of a Scots manse though you were
I’ve take the rare scunner against you,
You who thieve the golden hours of bairns,
You who bitch up the world’s peoples
With crystal images, pitch-black lies,
You who have ended civilized conversation
And dished out licenses to print banknotes,
May your soul shrink to the size of a midge
And never rest in a couthie kirkyard
But dart across a million wee screens
And be harassed by TV jingles for ever and ever,
For thine’s the kingdom of the televisor,
You goddam bloody genius, John Logie Baird!
Robert Greacen, curse
May you wander over the face of the earth forever, never sleep twice in the same bed, never drink water twice from the same well, and never cross the same river twice in a year.
Gypsy curse
May you be cursed with chronic anxiety about the weather.
John Burroughs
Fuck you.
Ed Koch, in response to a reporter’s allegations of war criminality. And countless others.
I hope you will pray too that the Lord will smite him hip and thigh, bone and marrow, heart and lungs and all there is to him; that he shall destroy him quickly and utterly.
Bob Jones III, a Christian fundamentalist, on Alexander Haig, after the latter refused Ian Paisley a visa to visit the USA
The Rev Ian Paisley has died. The authorities have asked that we should all observe a minute’s shouting.
David Baddiel
I fart in your general direction.
John Cleese, M
onty Python and the Holy Grail
Now I can finally say what a diplomat normally cannot to those he comes into contact with: I hope you encounter every curse imaginable!
Koji Haneda, First Secretary, Embassy of Japan (London), wishing the editor of this book success in his collection of insults
EU Referendum Scorn
How foul this referendum is. The most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime. May there never be another.
Robert Harris
Unchallenged master of the self-inflicted wound.
Nicholas Soames on Boris Johnson
The Brexit campaign doesn’t have any politician that would survive a Willy Wonka factory tour.
@JamesMelville
He’s the life and soul of the party but he’s not the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening.
Amber Rudd on Boris Johnson
Are we prepared to tell lies, to spread hate and xenophobia just to win a campaign? For me that’s a step too far.
Sayeeda Warsi, switching sides in the referendum campaign to Remain
It was only a matter of time before Lady Warsi would find a way – any way – to get on the news about something.
Ann Treneman
She’s running out of things to flounce out of.
Stewart Jackson, Conservative MP, on Sayeeda Wardi
He’s 100 per cent political herpes. Back in six months whatever you do. Or three days, like last time.
Camilla Long on Nigel Farage’s claim that he might quit politics if Britain leaves the EU. Long is referring to Farage’s previous resignation as UKIP leader, which had lasted only days.
It’s more than a U-turn. It’s the U-turn of a man who has got himself trapped in a revolving door.
Martin Kettle on Michael Gove’s referendum campaign
Remain has conducted a deceitful campaign. It has been nasty, cynical, personally abusive and beneath the dignity of Britain.
The Sun, coming out for Brexit
What did you promise Tyrie in return, George Osborne? Knighthood? Lords? Lasagne in kitchen at No 11? Sniff of your dirty socks?
Nadine Dorries, in a tweet she later withdrew, after Andrew Tyrie came out for Remain
I don’t want to stab the Prime Minister in the back – I want to stab him in the front so I can see the expression on his face. You’d have to twist the knife, though, because we want it back for Osborne.
Anonymous Tory MP on David Cameron and George Osborne
Countries usually don’t knowingly commit economic suicide, but in Britain, millions seem ready to give it a try.
Financial columnist Robert J. Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post
I think people in this country have had enough of experts.
Michael Gove
As a historian I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilisation in its entirety.
European Council President Donald Tusk
What they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.
AA Gill
[You’re a] twenty-first century Neville Chamberlain, waving a piece of paper in the air [and] saying to the public: ‘This is what I have, I have this prize, but a dictatorship in Europe can overrule it’.
Question Time audience member to David Cameron
The freedom Britain needs is freedom from a nasty Brexit Lie Machine run by tax dodgers and multi-millionaire liars fuelling anger and hate.
Alastair Campbell on Twitter
A vote for Leave will be taken by Farage and countless others as a vote for him, a vote for his posters, a vote for his ideas, a vote for his quiet malice, a vote for his smallness in the face of vast horrors. Is it worth it?
Marina Hyde
If we vote to stay then I am afraid the whole EU caravan carries blithely on; and when I think of the champagne-guzzling orgy of backslapping in Brussels that would follow a Remain vote on Friday, I want to weep. We must not let it happen.
Boris Johnson
David Cameron is colluding with the EU and lying to the British people.
Iain Duncan Smith on his Prime Minister David Cameron
What a non-campaign from a non-leader. Jeremy Corbyn: a man who descends to the big occasion.
Michael Deacon on Jeremy Corbyn
All through this campaign we were told Britain is the greatest country on Earth. Can we all now just agree that we’re a clueless shitheap? I mean, come on. A respectable nation would not have ended up like this. We are clowns. A crap cover version of a Victorian superpower.
Michael Deacon on Brexit
Britannia waives the rules.
Sinn Fein MEP on Brexit
I want any country back.
Charlie Brooker, responding to the Leave campaign’s ‘I want my country back’
Pretty sure that, when the history books are written, this era will be referred to as ‘The Fucking Hell’.
Caitlin Moran
The most egregious reverse ferret and act of treachery in modern political history.
Rachel Johnson on Michael Gove’s betrayal of her brother Boris
A sort of Westminster suicide bomber, whose deadly belt of explosives has been detonated not by his own hand, but by his own wife.
Rachel Johnson on Michael Gove’s betrayal of her brother Boris
They know what they are doing. Farage. Gove. Johnson. They have always known. That they were opening a Pandora’s Box. But it glistened before them so brightly.
And now we know too. The signs are everywhere. The plunging pound. The increasing panic on the stock market, not to mention the ever more strident attacks on the governor of the Bank of England, and any of the other despised ‘experts’ who dare to suggest Brexit represents a leap into the darkness.
In some ways, this is the most insidious element of all. The bonfire of reason that now underpins the Leave campaign.
Facts, logic, experience – the foundations upon which any rational debate must rest – are systematically dynamited in pursuit of an intellectual abstraction known as ‘sovereignty’.
Project Hate has brought us to the brink. Britain – the country we live in this morning – stands on the edge. This time next week it could all be gone. Our economic security. Our national security. Our international security. Imagine if it works. The overt racism. The overt demonisation of refugees. The graphic threats to stab the Prime Minister in the chest. Imagine if that is what constitutes a successful British political campaign in 2016.
Dan Hodges on the Brexit campaigners, three days before the referendum
So Boris smashed up the whole place for nothing. For nothing.
Philip Collins after Boris Johnson pulled out of the Conservative leadership race
What a sad sad day for Europe and the world. All has changed, changed utterly, a terrible ugliness has been born.
Guardian journalist Lisa O’Carroll
I think with Michael as Prime Minister we’d go to war with about three countries at once.
Ken Clarke, recorded by a microphone that was left on, on Michael Gove’s prime ministerial ambitions
Bite me.
Response to the Electoral Commission in a press release from Leave. EU during the aftermath of the Referendum. The press release also instructed Victoria Beckham and Gary Linker to ‘Bring it on, luvvies.’
[Gove] stood before the media with a claim so preposterous it must have been included in his speech as a dare. ‘I stand here not as the result of calculation.’ Funny old turn of events, then. ‘Whatever charisma is, I don’t have it; whatever glamour may be, I don’t think anyone could ever associate me with it.’ Consider us up to speed on that front
. But if you need help identifying your current personal brand, it’s weapons-grade treachery.
Marina Hyde on Michael Gove’s leadership launch
A tragic conflict of disloyalties.
Marina Hyde on Michael Gove’s leadership launch
We need to renegotiate a new relationship with the EU, based on free trade and friendly cooperation.
#Gove2016
We had one, and you helped destroy it; you are one confused bag of mince.
@Mr_Dave_Haslam, in response
You can’t REnegotiate something NEW you boil-in-the-bag rent-a-clown.
@PULPKetchup, in response
Then what is the point of leaving, you incompetent ventriloquist-dummy-faced spunktrumpet?
@MJ_Boh_, in response
That’s what we HAD, you reprehensible spam faced tool bag!
@InvaderXan, in response
I’m sure they’ll love that after all the lovely things your gang said about them you back stabbing cockwomble.
@Brummiecris, in response
Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME? We had one of those you haunted pork mannequin.
@AlexWattsEsq, in response
I hate this referendum, for turning a question of unfathomable complexity into Lord of the Flies.
Hugh Laurie
Acknowledgements
Nothing in this book is new. To my helpers, Alex Dudok de Wit and George Morris, has fallen the task of gathering the mountain from which I have assembled this personal molehill of an anthology. They have worked hard for many months, and I am grateful. I have relied not only on their industry, but their judgement. Cecily Gayford, at Profile Books, has been a wise and helpful editor.
My thanks to those hundreds of friends and long-shot acquaintances whom we contacted for suggestions, many of which have found their way into the book; to my peerless agent Ed Victor; a special word of thanks to Andrew Franklin, my proactive and creative editor for the first, Penguin, edition of this book, and now my publisher. Thanks also to Dr Richard Parkinson at the British Museum and to the editors of dozens of dictionaries, anthologies and works of reference in this field, on whose research we have drawn. These are too numerous to list in full, but the following have been particularly useful:
An Anthology of Invective and Abuse, ed. Hugh Kingsmill (London, 1930); A Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations, ed. Jonathan Green (London, 1982); A Dictionary of International Slurs, ed. A. A. Roback (Wisconsin, 1979); A Dictionary of Sexist Quotations, ed. Selma James (Hemel Hempstead, 1984); The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humour by Amy Richlin (London, 1983); The Guinness Dictionary of Poisonous Quotes, ed. Colin Jarman (London, 1991); Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicholas Slonimsky (Washington, DC, 1965); Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression, ed. Rheinhold Aman (1977–86); Picking on Men by Judy Allen (London, 1985); Shakespeare’s Insults, ed. Wayne Hill and Cynthia J. Ottchen (Cambridge, 1992); Far Too Noisy, My Dear Mozart, ed. Jennifer Higgie (Michael O’Mara Books, 1997).
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