BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Rapparee
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 01:19 AM

All right.

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Senoufou
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 03:29 AM

'Noisome weeds that need plucking and burning..' sounds like my garden at the moment. The blasted things are going mad, what with the unusual warm weather and a bit of rain.

I reckon you've earned the prize for your Shakespearian insults Rap. That was a magnificent display of erudite, eloquent and poetic abuse.
I can only admire and envy.

Keberoxu did well to resurrect this thread. I feel an irresistible urge to insult someone roundly. I'm not even going to Scotland this year, so can't jeer at the hairy-legged Scots. Who would like to be the butt of my evil tongue-lashing eh? Form an orderly queue please...

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Senoufou
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 04:25 AM

My snobby sister reads the Times newspaper (God!) but just occasionally she sends me some funny stuff. They had a list of expressions of foreign origin with definitions. Here are a couple:-

inuendo - an Italian suppository

magnum opus - a large Irish cat

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 06:19 AM

Innuendo is great. A really beautiful woman asked me for an example of innuendo yesterday, so I gave her one!

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Senoufou
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 07:14 AM

Haha Georgian!

If I read the Times like my sister,I might be able to spell innuendo correctly.

Subject: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: keberoxu
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 05:11 PM

My reason for reviving this thread is to post what was written by someone two hundred years ago, actually.

See, Thomas Moore wrote a song that did not yet have its own Mudcat thread. So I started the thread, posted the song, and continued the thread with posts of parodies of the song. Which led to a lyric by the Rev. John Graham in defense of The Smiling Potatoes:

Sweet roots of Erin! we can't do without them
/ Poor Corporal Cobbett knows nothing about them...
(to be sung to the tune of Dear Creatures, We Can't Live Without Them)

Cobbett? Who he?
William Cobbett was unknown to me. A search of Mudcat threads will reveal that Cobbett and his "Rural Rides" are sacrosanct to more than one Mudcat member; good enough. But of course, not much help with the potato question. Therefore I had to find out where Cobbett stood with regard to potatoes, and so help me, I'm sorry I ever asked. It's bad enough how he feels about potatoes: that to feed them to pigs is an insult to the pig, never mind human consumption. But Cobbett's anti-potato rants, published and archived all these years, drag in his other pet peeves. That's the what of it: the how of it, his method of getting the feelings off his chest, reminds me of nothing so much as some of the Mudcat threads in the BS section.
In my next thread, some Cobbett quotes. I think this thread is a fitting home for them.

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 05:22 PM

Rapparee neglected to call us blocks, stones and worse then senseless things (remembered from 'O' Level Eng Lit, JMB, 1967, Julius Caesar).

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Donuel
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 07:10 PM

Oh Mr. Block you were born by mistake
you take the cake, you make me ache
Tie a rock on your block and jump into the lake
please do it for Hillary's sake

Oh Mr. Block you're just a big fake
you're far from great, you're way too late
You are a twit for a tweet you're so easy to bait
So go and have a sinister fate.

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: keberoxu
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 07:14 PM

William Cobbett: "To the Editor of the Agricultural Magazine.
On the Subject of Potatoes." 1815.   Quotes.

It has become, of late years, the fashion to extol the virtues of potatoes, as it has been to admire the writings of Milton and Shakespear....it is the sacrificing of reason to fashion....it is to fashion that the potatoe owes its general cultivation and use.
If you ask me, whether fashion can possibly make a nation prefer one sort of diet to another, I ask you what it is that can make a nation admire Shakespear? What is it that can make them call him a "Divine Bard,"   nine-tenths of whose works are made up of such trash as no decent man, now-a-days, would not be ashamed, and even afraid, to put his name to? What can make an audience in London sit and hear, and even applaud, under the name of Shakespear, what they would hoot off the stage in a moment, if it came forth in any other name?....What can make them endure a ghost cap-à-pie, a prince who, for justice sake, pursues his uncle and his mother, and who stabs and old gentleman in sport, and cries out 'dead for a ducat! Dead' ? What can they find to 'delight' them in punning clowns, in ranting heroes, in sorcerers, ghosts, witches, fairies, monsters, soothsayers, dreamers; in incidents out of nature, in scenes most unnecessarily bloody?

...But, it is the same all through the work. I know of one other, and only one other, book so obscene as this; and if I were to judge from the high favour in which these two books seem to stand, I should conclude, that wild and improbable fiction, bad principles of morality and politics, obscurity in meaning, bombastical language, forced jokes, puns, and smut, were fitted to the minds of the people....

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: keberoxu
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 07:29 PM

William Cobbett: from Chapter VII: Potatoes, in Part II,
A Year's Residence in the United States of America

The previous post gives excerpts only from the potato letter from 1815.
In this 1822 book, Cobbett reprints the potato letter in its entirety, and continues:

Now, observe, I never received any answer to this. Much abuse. New torrents of abuse; and, in language still more venomous than the former; for now the Milton and Shakespear men, the critical Parsons, took up the pen; and when you have an angry Priest for adversary, it is not the common viper, but the rattlesnake, that you have to guard against.

....I beg to be understood as saying nothing against the cultivation of potatoes in any place, or near any place where there are people willing to consume them at half a dollar a bushel, when wheat is two dollars a bushel. If any one will buy dirt to eat, and if one can get dirt to him with more profit than one can get wheat to him, let us supply him with dirt by all means. It is his taste to eat dirt; and, if his taste have nothing immoral in it, let him, in the name of all that is ridiculous, follow his taste....
Nor do I say, that it is filthy to eat potatoes. I do not ridicule the using of them as sauce. What I laugh at is, the idea of the use of them being a saving....
As food for cattle, sheep, or hogs, this is the worst of all the green and root crops; but, of this, I have said enough before; and therefore, I now dismiss the Potatoe with the hope, that I shall never again have to write the word, or see the thing.

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Greg F.
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 08:17 PM

I think Joel Hägglund would approve, Donuel.

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Rapparee
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 08:48 PM

Good ol' Alex Pope:

Let Sporus tremble—"What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'r enjoys,
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid impotence he speaks,
And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks;
Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,
Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,
In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,
Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies.
His wit all see-saw, between that and this ,
Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,
And he himself one vile antithesis.
Amphibious thing! that acting either part,
The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,
Fop at the toilet, flatt'rer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.
Eve's tempter thus the rabbins have express'd,
A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest;
Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.

       Not fortune's worshipper, nor fashion's fool,
Not lucre's madman, nor ambition's tool,
Not proud, nor servile, be one poet's praise,
That, if he pleas'd, he pleas'd by manly ways;
That flatt'ry, even to kings, he held a shame,
And thought a lie in verse or prose the same:
That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long,
But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song:
That not for fame, but virtue's better end,
He stood the furious foe, the timid friend,
The damning critic, half-approving wit,
The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit;
Laugh'd at the loss of friends he never had,
The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad;
The distant threats of vengeance on his head,
The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed;
The tale reviv'd, the lie so oft o'erthrown;
Th' imputed trash, and dulness not his own;
The morals blacken'd when the writings 'scape;
The libell'd person, and the pictur'd shape;
Abuse, on all he lov'd, or lov'd him, spread,
A friend in exile, or a father, dead;
The whisper, that to greatness still too near,
Perhaps, yet vibrates on his sovereign's ear:—
Welcome for thee, fair Virtue! all the past:
For thee, fair Virtue! welcome ev'n the last!

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Ed T
Date: 06 Aug 16 - 09:02 PM

Seasonally appropriate, ice cream abuse  

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Donuel
Date: 07 Aug 16 - 10:02 AM

Greg since you knew and understood that, I suspect you know a lot.
I do not agree with some of your pov, but I admit I am impressed.

Donuel

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: Greg F.
Date: 07 Aug 16 - 10:14 AM

I do not agree with some of your pov

Small wonder...   ;>)

but I admit I am impressed.

You shouldn't be, but thanks anyway!

Best,

Greg

Subject: RE: BS: Can we have a Permanent abuse thread
From: keberoxu
Date: 12 Aug 16 - 12:45 PM

More from William Cobbett, about "Paradise Lost."

"All this, and indeed, the whole of Milton's poem, is such barbarous trash, so outrageously offensive to reason and to common sense, that one is naturally led to wonder how it can have been tolerated by a people, amongst whom astronomy, navigation and chemistry are understood. But, it is the fashion to turn up the eyes, when 'Paradise Lost' is mentioned; and if you fail herein, you want taste; you want judgment even, if you do not admire this absurd and ridiculous stuff, when, if one of your relations were to write a letter in the same strain, you would send him to a mad-house and take his estate. It is the sacrificing of reason to fashion."

from "On the Subject of Potatoes", Cobbett's Political Register, Vol 29