SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Gobermouch Mumblecrust and Smellfungus -- among other legal firms.

Google "old English insults" and you'll come up with numerous lists like this one. For British insults belonging to contemporary times, go here.

42 Old English Insults, by Paul Anthony Jones (Mental Floss)

Besides being the greatest writer in the history of the English language, William Shakespeare was the master of the pithy put-down. So the nervous servant who tells Macbeth his castle is under attack is dismissed as a “cream-faced loon.” Oswald in King Lear isn’t just a useless idiot, he’s a “whoreson zed,” an “unnecessary letter.” Lear’s ungrateful daughter Goneril is “a plague-sore,” an “embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.” And when Falstaff doubts something Mistress Quickly has said in Henry IV: Part 1, he claims, “there’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.” (And there’s a good chance he didn’t intend “stewed prune” to mean dried fruit.) But you don’t have to rely just on Shakespeare to spice up your vocabulary. Next time someone winds you up or you need to win an argument in fine style, why not try dropping one of these old-fashioned insults into your conversation?

Here are just a few.

2. BEDSWERVER
An adulterer. Another of Shakespeare’s inventions that became popular in Victorian slang.

6. DALCOP
Cop is an old word for the head, making a dalcop (literally a “dull-head”) a particularly stupid person. You can also be a harecop, or a “hare-brained” person.

11. FOPDOODLE
An insignificant or foolish man.

13. FUSTILARIAN
Another of Shakespeare’s best put-downs, coined in Henry IV, Part 2: "Away, you scullion! You rampallion! You fustilarian! I'll tickle your catastrophe," Falstaff exclaims. If not just a variation of fustylugs, he likely meant it to mean someone who stubbornly wastes time on worthless things.

20. LOITER-SACK
This is a 17th century term for a slacker. An idling, lazy good-for-nothing. Literally, someone who seems to spend all day in bed.

30. SKELPIE-LIMMER
A badly-behaved child. Coined by the Scottish poet Robert Burns from the old Scots word skelpie, meaning “misbehaving” or “deserving punishment.”

40. WHIFFLE-WHAFFLE
An indecisive, time-wasting ditherer.

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: "Ignorance has won," says Apostrophe Protection Society. We'd like to disagree, but cannot.

And while we're at it, perhaps a mandatory refresher course in the proper use (and frequency) of exclamation marks?

No sirree, I won't back down.

I will continue my lonely struggle against bangorrhea (exclamation mark diarrhea) for so long as an ounce of strength remains to tear my hair and mutter recriminations.

Stop it!

Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won', by Tim Baker (The Evening Standard)

The Apostrophe Protection Society will close

A society dedicated to preserving the correct use of the apostrophe has shut down because "ignorance has won".

Retired journalist John Richards, 96, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 to make sure the “much-abused” punctuation mark was being used correctly.

But Mr Richards has now announced: “With regret I have to announce that, after some 18 years, I have decided to close the Apostrophe Protection Society.

“There are two reasons for this. One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language."

He added: “We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won” ...

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: We have every right to swear at that f**king end-of-sentence preposition rule.

"Swearing seems to activate a different linguistic circuitry than the normal speech loop."

The three-minute video is surprisingly exhaustive, and you may wish to use ear buds in sensitive environments -- or just say "fuck it."

Swearing often abets "putting the boot in" (in Great Britain, to "attack another person by saying something cruel, often when the person is already feeling weak or upset"), but what about that preposition placement, anyway?

Where the ‘No Ending a Sentence With a Preposition’ Rule Comes From, by Dan Nosowitz (Atlas Obscura)

Where the ‘No Ending a Sentence With a Preposition’ Rule Comes From
It all goes back to 17th-century England and a fusspot named John Dryden.

THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF INDIVIDUAL rules for proper grammatical use of any given language; mostly, these are created, and then taught, in order to maximize understanding and minimize confusion. But the English language prohibition against “preposition stranding”—ending a sentence with a preposition like with, at, or of—is not like this. It is a fantastically stupid rule that when followed often has the effect of mangling a sentence. And yet for hundreds of years, schoolchildren have been taught to create disastrously awkward sentences like “With whom did you go?”

The origins of this rule date back to one guy you may have heard of. Of whom you may have heard. Whatever. His name was John Dryden ...

Sunday morning coffee reading: "Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity."

The author does not begrudge Orwell's talents. Rather, he feels "less well-disposed to those mediocrities who slavishly worship at the shrine of St George."

A Point of View: Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity, by Will Self.

... The trouble for the George Orwells of this world is that they don't like the ways in which our tongue is being shaped. In this respect they're indeed small "c" conservatives, who would rather peer at meaning by the guttering candlelight of a Standard English frozen in time, than have it brightly illumined by the high-wattage of the living, changing language.

Orwell and his supporters may say they're objecting to jargon and pretension, but underlying this are good old-fashioned prejudices against difference itself. Only homogenous groups of people all speak and write identically. People from different heritages, ethnicities, classes and regions speak the same language differently, duh!

Don't be a puckfist and Come To Whipper-tootie City.

Just keep your filthy mitts off my trinkgeld.

66 Facts You May Not Have Known About The English Language, by Paul Anthony Jones (Huffington Post)

Thanks to the Bookseller for the link.

Erika changes her mind and get Diane Benedetti-McCartin's name backwards, too.

I was delighted when Erika endorsed me at Freedom to Screech.

Anyone but Gahan and England in 2015.

Well, I'm anyone -- and so are many others, for that matter. Now she's reversing field and withdrawing the endorsement, it having taken only 20 days for her to notice that she'd done so in the first place.

Our final thoughts: A message to Mr. "Bully" Baylor. Hell would freeze over before Freedom of Speech would EVER Support or Endorse you.

Easy come, easy go. I think she's just biased against non-smokers.

But there's even more. See if YOU can locate the coherent English-language sentence in this nicotine-stained gargling from the wee hours, this morning.

TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2014

WHAT WE BELIEVE....

What we here at Freedom Of Speech believes is for those opposed to intolerance, excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monoplize opinion or suppress freedom of thought, expression and worship.

It's just that simple.....

For heaven's sake, lady; what did the King ever do to you to have his native tongue mangled this way?

Or was it just the Bud Light Lime-a-Rita talking?

“These shifts always reflect a change in sensibility.”

Sometimes it slips away from us, especially in a place where sensibility seemingly went to die, but words and ideas matter.

The Decline and Fall of the ‘H’ Word; For Manys Gays and Lesbians, the Term ‘Homosexual’ is Flinch-Worthy, by Jeremy W. Peters (NYT)

To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough: homosexual.

But that five-syllable word has never been more loaded, more deliberately used and, to the ears of many gays and lesbians, more pejorative ...