The Pirate Review - Thy Father is a Gorbellied Codpiece!: Create Over 100,000 of Your Own Shakespearean Insults

READ THIS REVIEW, THOU FUMBLING MILK-LIVERED CLOTPOLE!

Every time another year rolls around, I see reiterated without fail the same tattered set of New Year's resolutions—drop twenty pounds, make a difference, find a mate, get a better job—blah, blah, blah. As the stock market guys like to say, past performance is no indication of future results—but I'm going to go way out on a limb and predict that, just as last year, the majority of these resolutions will be forgotten within a month. (Many have already perished in the glow provided by the first champagne toast of the New Year.) Since this ritual usually doesn't affect bupkis in our lives, why do we continue to bother with it? Does hope spring eternal, or are we as a species nothing more than a pack of ill-nurtured, pribbling beefwits?

Or perhaps it's time for us, clay-brained idiot-worshippers that we are, to consider the New Year's resolution in a new light. Perhaps it's time to throw out the jaded old resolutions and come up with some new, intriguing, vital ones—resolutions with spirit, resolutions that make us want to follow through, rather than the resolutions we discard by the side of the road as one would an infectious strumpet.

Which brings us to one of my personal New Year's resolutions—to increase the overall quality, creativity and frequency of my insults.

The English language has inspired such a marvelous panoply of words and synonyms that perhaps no other spoken language, living or dead, is as supple or as utile when it comes to insult generation. The English verbal insult used to be an art form, a pastime of royalty, a kind of vile poetry in motion. In days of old, bystanders would watch in awe or cheer for their favorite as insult-athletes, well fortified with equal parts loquacity and liquor, would pour out bitter streams of invective upon their opponents. As of late, this once-proud sport has shrunk to such a sorry state that the modern insult is composed of a mere monodigital gesture and guttural suggestion of self-copulation.

It doesn't have to be this way. The mighty English insult deserves a renaissance, and editor Barry Kraft intends to bring it to you in the handy form of an interactive book. Thy Father is a Gorbellied Codpiece! Create Over 100,000 of Your Own Shakespearean Insults takes words and phrases directly from the plays of Elizabethan insult-master William Shakespeare and places them in flip-book format, so that you may form numerous tripartate insults (two adjectives and a noun) just by twiddling with the pages a bit. Kraft also prefaces the book with a short introduction to the art of the insult, and how to get the most out of your Shakespearean invective. Kraft has further indicated certain unique words in the book by two symbols: an extended finger (an INDEX finger, you churlish logger-headed dullard!) to indicate the word first appeared in print in Shakespeare's writings, and a capital N to indicate a "nonce word," one which Shakespeare is known to have used but once.

The only improvement which could be made to this otherwise peerless little book would be a better binding job; Smithmark Publishers wisely gave the flip-book a spiral binding, but the size of the spiral needs to be a bit larger to let the pages flip freely. Further, in the few months I've had this book, the cover has warped a bit. Only a true motley-minded parasite would save a penny or two at the expense of a book's usefulness. Faugh!

The only other difficulty, of course, is that the targets of your newly-enriched verbal abuse are unlikely to understand, much less appreciate, the gist of your colorful profanities. 'Tis sad indeed to engage in a verbal battle of wits with the unarmed, but alas, such is modern life.

I would truly be a thankless knotty-pated dissembler if I did not tip the hat to my friend Tara, who presented me with this book as a going-away gift. It was meant for future writing projects, but I suppose she also figured that in college I'd need all the abuse-fodder I could get my insolent little hands on. Thanks, Tara; your gift-giving skills are magnificent.

Besides, it's about time I found a resolution I could stick with.