Suggest your substitute vocabulary of insults here:

[hedgehog]

there are concepts, usually insults, that we all want to express, but the words we use are now offensive. How do we insult our target without hitting innocent bystanders that we don't intend to offend?

For example, from time to time someone does something outlandishly stupid. The term "retard" is incredibly offensive. Use the term "dolt" instead.

[YOY]

1. You don't like "asshat" or "clownshoes"?

I do.

I piss of plenty of folks with the latter and there's no profanity involved at all.

[hedgehog]

2. Ooooooh! I like clown shoes!

What we need is a replacement for the term "pansy" to describe an ineffectual weakling. I only use that term when tallking about my garden myself, but a lot of people here want to have a term to apply to McCain without insulting our GLBT members!

[Journeyman]

3. I've preferred Herman Melville for years. . .

"Ye sons of bachelors," cried Captain Peleg.

Gives a certain flair to the insult, a combination of terms, neither spoken outright but both encompassed neatly in a decidedly non-expletive phrase.

[Berry Cool]

4. When I get mad at my (female) cats

I call them "daughters of a queen." (A "queen" being the name for a mother cat.) Sort of the feline equivalent of "son of a bitch," but doesn't have the same violent sound.

My personal favorite epithet is one my mother used to use: "Son of a seacook!"

[anigbrowl]

5. Get a clue, peabrain

Personally I prefer more offensive terms, rather than fewer. But that only works on websites where everyone shares a similar sense of humor and knows what to take personally and what not.

[Terry in Austin]

6. ooh! ooh! let's see...

How about:

"You cheesy second hand electric donkey-bottom biter."
"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"
"I one more time unclog my nose in your direction, son of a window-dresser!"
"Go and boil your bottom, son of a silly person."
"Remain gone, illegitimate-faced bugger-folk! And if you think you got a nasty taunting this time, you ain't heard nothing yet, dappy English k-nnniggets! Thpppt!"

Well, that last one may be a little too specific to the situation...

[Fumesucker]

7. Having a political conversation with freepers is like...

Watching a school of Argument Fish being pursued by a Truth Shark, they jink, double back and jacknife in a random manner so that by the time you have your facts and logical argument all fired up and ready they aren't even *there* any more.

http://herbison.com/canon/fulldeck.html

A bad case of colon nose..

A gross ignoramus, 144 times worse than a regular ignoramus.

Doesn't quite sample at the Nyquist rate.

During evolution his ancestors were in the control group.

Full of wisdumb.

Goalie for the dart/javelin team.

Has been seen tossing bread crumbs to helicopters.

His reaction time is longer than his attention span.

Hitler's evil twin.

In a tub of Preparation H, he'd shrink down to thumb size.

Monorail doesn't go all the way to Tomorrowland.

Phototrophic on a better day.

Playing an endgame with a king and no other pieces.

Requires retraining after every coffee break.

[ailsagirl]

8. ninny, dolt, moron, idiot, ditz, clueless, stupid, jackass, half-wit ,

imbecile, cretin, and nincompoop.

[Fumesucker]

9. And then there was the insult hurled by Gunnery Sargeant Highway..

In "Heartbreak Ridge".

You're a poster child for prophylactics.

[countryjake]

10. A term handed down in my midwestern family, Prick Hadley...

has become known, once again, in this western place I'd long ago resettled to. My grandma and mother always used it as the ultimate insult for someone who's nose was so far up in the air that they couldn't smell their own stink. It relates back to the days of the Puritans and religious prudes of colonial ilk. I find it comes in handy with fundamentalist fanatics these days and leaves them seriously wondering what the hell, except that most are hep to my meaning now.

[TahitiNut]

11. Try this:

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As they say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on. This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

[Terry in Austin]

13. LOL - Aces!

Passed master of the verbal haircut. Guru of gotcha. Prince(ess?) of put-em-in-their-place. Imam of insult. Sultan of slam. Wizard of razz. (Need I go on?) I'm savin' this one!
:toast:

[TahitiNut]

14. That's a part of Internet Lore ... first published on Usenet, author unknown.

:evilgrin:

If you Google select phrases from it or "ultimate flame" then you'll find references to it, most reliably on Usenet.

[Terry in Austin]

16. I loves them intertubes

Thanks for helping keep the lore alive!

[MilesColtrane]

12. cocknose, shitheel, ass weasel...

[Waiting For Everyman]

15. VN vets used to say... lower than a sack of Siberian

snake sh*t.

The "commie" implication might annoy RWers more too.