As we mentioned over at WordsIHate, these days everything from boogie boarding to buttholes can be called “awesome” (especially buttholes). And correspondingly, everything can also be called “stupid”. “Stupid” no longer means “stupid”, it just means bad. So now we don’t yell out “BAD BABY!” we shout, “STUPID BABY!” but the baby isn’t really dumb, she’s just a piece of crap. It might actually be a highly intelligent baby, but we call her stupid because she’s shitty. Like maybe she’s kind of fat or something. So we call her “stupid” so people will know she’s not a very good baby. Normally, this is distasteful — for words to lose their edge. But fortunately for land-owning literati like myself (who say “aquaria” rather than “aquariums” because we’re not high on paint like you are, ALL THE TIME) there is still a word that has retained its meaning of “stupid”. That word is asinine, and I love it.
If you want to get on someone’s bad side, call them stupid. “You’re stupid” or “your ideas are stupid” or “your baby is stupid because you fucked your wife high on paint. We told you not to but you did that anyway”. But if you want to see somebody renounce their pacifism and beat the testicles out of your scrotum (like Gandhi did during his second coming), fold your arms and say “that is a completely asinine idea.” There is simply no comeback for this that doesn’t involve uppercuts and genocide. There is no word you can use that undercuts asinine. This the molten core, the deepest point, the southern pole. Move in any direction and you move away from hatred and ignorance toward love and intelligence. Even puerile, which is an almost pubic word, isn’t far from just calling someone childish.
Asinine is the king of literary insults. Use it sparingly, but devastatingly.
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