Word: insults
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...national assets, regard their beatniks with tolerant amusement. Charles de Gaulle's police have been trying, with scant success, to shoo them out of newly scrubbed Paris. Chancellor Ludwig Erhard is truly outraged, for the happy-go-lucky Gammler, as they are known in West Germany, are an insult to the image of neat, tidy, hard-working Germans...
Reasoning that thousands of frustrated tourists must have the same difficulty, he had an ingenious notion: Why not publish a foreign-language phrase book composed entirely of rebukes and insults? The result is the Wolfe Publishing Co.'s Insult Dictionary, subtitled, "How to Be Abusive in Five Languages," which has already sold some 50,000 copies across the Atlantic, promises to sell thousands more in its forthcoming U.S. edition. With 127 pages of snappish asperities in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish, the Insult Dictionary provides useful tips for conversations with surly cab drivers, arrogant bank tellers, clumsy hairdressers...
...added pepper and spice, Wolfe includes 52 "hard words," all-purpose insults that can be dropped in as needed. Example: "Hairy creep," which is Oiler Leisetreter in German, Troglodyte in French, Stupido scimmione in Italian and Espantapájaros in Spanish. "The insult must flash like lightning," admonishes Wolfe. "It must not be delivered tardily or with the hesitancy which is so often engendered if one is wondering whether or not the last syllable is to be inflected. Again, a slightly mangled pronunciation sometimes gives the insult a macabre quality; it may add to its stunning effect on the insultee...
Tourists should have no problem knowing when their insult has struck home. They will "immediately notice the sudden contortion of the victim's features, the suffusion of blood to his head, the clasping and unclasping of his hands, the spasmodic twitchings of his whole frame and a number of other outward manifestations of inward disquiet. And surely this will be a sufficient reward...
...Insult, like any other minor art, attracts its not-so-artful practitioners. Currently the bluntest instrument of them all is a Los Angeles broadcaster named Joe Pyne, who has become simultaneously the industry's hottest property and, as New York Times Critic Jack Gould recently said, its "ranking nuisance." On his interview shows, Pyne often addresses callers and guests as "stupid," "jerk" or "meathead." An epileptic was once asked: "Just why do you think people should feel sorry for you?" Pyne's standard lines run from "Go gargle with razor blades" to "Take your teeth...