For my wife’s last birthday someone gave her a large coffee-mug printed with a collection of insults from Shakespeare — barbs from the bard, if you will. These colorful jibes are epically epithetical. Some examples:
- beetle-headed, flap-ear’d knave
- quintessence of dust
- canker-blossom
- poisonous bunch-back’d toad
- a fusty nut with no kernel
- clod of wayward marl
- roast-meat for worms
- infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker
- anointed sovereign of sighs and groans
- foot-licker
- lump of foul deformity
- highly fed and lowly taught
- all eyes and no sight
- all the infections the sun sucks up
- elvish-mark’d abortive, rooting hog
- veriest varlet that ever chewed with a tooth
- mountain of mad flesh
- light of brain
- bolting-hutch of beastliness
- not so much brain as ear-wax
- long-tongu’d babbling gossip
- thou are a boil, a plague sore
- I do desire that we may be better strangers
As I said, the mug was given to her. Yet she serves me my coffee in it. Methinks she’s trying to tell me something.
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I think you’re just being overly sensitive.