There's a growing crisis in swearing in this country. After centuries during which everyone was happy to call each other bastards, pricks and wankers, there's a renewed enthusiasm for faux-archaic compound insults. 'Cockwomble' is the breakout star, but jump into any Brexit-adjacent Twitter thread and you'll see them. 'Wankpuffin'. 'Nobsocket'. 'Shitflute'. 'Spunktrumpet'.

It looked like the phenomenon had peaked a year or so ago, but the political spasms of the last six months have seen it make a unwelcome return. Google searches for 'cockwomble' levelled out to roughly 20 or 30 a week in the UK in the first half of this year, but then spiked in the 70s in mid-July. That was about the time Boris Johnson - a man with more culpability for this trend than most - resigned as Foreign Secretary.

There's something about Brexit - and Trump, who back in 2016 was coated in a hail of shitgibbons and cockwombles on Twitter when he suggested that Remain-backing Scotland had voted to take back control of itself - which makes people want to pretend they're Malcolm Tucker.

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You, sir, are clearly a complete and utter cockwomble if you believe this rubbish you spout. — Tim Woods (@TimWoods63) August 23, 2018

The problem is that they're not. This is decidedly un-Tuckerish and suffocatingly twee stuff. Despite the apparent coarseness, this 'inventive' swearing is on the same continuum as swing dancing and having Live Laugh Love wall decals in your kitchen, suitable only for New European readers who really, really, really like Blackadder and call each other 'sir' on Twitter.

It's not clear where the urge to formulate swearwords which sound like surnames of minor Harry Potter characters came from, but it's been leapt on as a really easy way to make yourself sound a bit witty. Pick a swear word, add a slightly unexpected noun, launch it at Dominic Raab and hey - you're a Radio 4 quiz show panellist.

Oddly, for something so popular with the anti-Brexit #FBPE gang, these insults seem weirdly Tory too. They're a bit too pleased with themselves - a bit too chummy, plummy, jolly-good, Pimm's o'clock bollocks. Certainly Johnson - a man who never uses one word when three circular, repetitive paragraphs will do - is a massive fan of an anachronistic insult. The popular theory is that his bumbling professor persona is a misdirection under which he does his power-grabbing thing with impunity, and the sense that he's just been bundled out of the Drones Club is a key part of his schtick. Take his greatest hit, a grandstanding description of Jeremy Corbyn as a "mutton-headed old mugwump". Both mugwump and cockwomble are about the maverick genius of the insulter rather than the crimes of failings of the insulted. Both are absolutely delighted with their own linguistic gymnastics, and both are completely insufferable.

The idea that this kind of linguistic cut-and-shut job automatically puts whoever uses it in the same literary lineage as Dickens, Carroll and Wodehouse is a fallacy. Crucially, it's also a case of reinventing the wheel. A solid, agricultural English insult has an implicit poetry of its own, and they do their jobs perfectly. To take one example: a prick is a prick. Drop it at the right time and the insult lands like a hand grenade, and that's because you know what it means without necessarily being able to fully articulate it. It means you're a prick, mate - end of.

There's definite difference between a prick and a dick too, and it takes a lifetime of immersion in British culture to know instinctively what that is. You know a prick, and you know that while they're a prick, they're probably not a dick. Shakespeare has Mercutio say 'prick' in Romeo & Juliet. Auden would call someone a prick. So would Larkin, Donne or Sassoon. You know who'd call someone a cockwomble? Marcus Brigstocke.

If you use these words, you're turning your back on the rich history of earthy, brutish, egalitarian British swearing to evoke some bizarre Thorpe Park fantasy Britain set somewhere between 1928 and 1954. It's not that there's no room for innovation in swearing, but the forsaking our national inheritance - your everyday fucks, shits and bastards - for smug, self-consciously quirksome insults is a travesty which must be stopped.



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