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in Dict. of Invective (1991) 109: Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) [...] wrote a series of dialogues ... ‘Speak plainly and say “fuck,” “prick,” “cunt,” and “ass” if you want anyone except the scholars at the university in Rome to understand you. You with your [...] “job,” “affair,” “big news,” “handle,” “arrow,” “carrot,” “root,” and all shit there is.’. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 109: Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) [...] wrote a series of dialogues ... ‘Speak plainly and say ‘fuck,’ ‘prick,’ ‘cunt,’ and ‘ass’ if you want anyone except the scholars at the university in Rome to understand you. You with your ‘rope in the ring,’ your ‘obelisk in the Colosseum,’ . . . your ‘sword in the scabbard,’ not to mention your ‘stake,’ your ‘crozier,’ your ‘parsnip,’ your ‘little monkey,’ your ‘this,’ your ‘that,’ your . . . ‘job,’ ‘affair,’ ‘big news,’ ‘handle,’ ‘arrow,’ ‘carrot,’ ‘root,’ and all shit there is. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 109: Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) [...] wrote a series of dialogues ... ‘Speak plainly and say “fuck,” “prick,” “cunt,” and “ass” if you want anyone except the scholars at the university in Rome to understand you. You with your “rope in the ring,” your “obelisk in the Colosseum,” . . . [...] not to mention your [...] “little monkey,” your “this,” your “that,” [...] and all shit there is.’. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 269: John Rolfe, husband to Pocahontas, recorded in his journal the first shipment of blacks to Virginia: ‘there came in a Dutch man-of-warre that sold us 20 negars (8/20/1619)’. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 269: The inventory of an estate in the town of Gravesend, now part of Brooklyn, New York, included ‘One niggor boy’ (12/12/1689). ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 29: The prototypical Frenchman in John Arbuthnot’s The History of John Bull (1712) was Lewis Baboon. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 421: The Reverend Cotton Mather meanwhile, used the term in its modern lecherous sense in 1721, describing an Anglican clergyman, James McSparran, as a ‘grevious wolf.’. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 9: When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wished to describe the uninhibited behaviour of the wife of the French ambassador upon receiving visitors in 1724, the word she used was pissing. cited in Dict. of Invective (1991) 365: Cambridge, Massachusetts, was dismissed as a ‘Snotty Town’ by an Anglican minister, the Reverend Timothy Cutler, in a letter on April 2, 1725. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 49: mudhead. Also a native of Tennessee (Dictionary of American English, 1838). ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 307: Karl Marx once threatened to sue a London newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, which he described as being owned by ‘polack Jews’ (letter to Freidrich Engels, 2/9/1860, in Saul Padover, Karl Marx, An Intimate Biography, 1980). letter 30 Jan. in H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 19: [on R.W. Emerson] A gap-toothed and hoary-headed ape, carried at first into notice on the shoulder of Carlyle, and who now in his dotage spits and chatters from a dirtier perch of his own finding and fouling. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 318: When John Saul, a male prostitute involved in the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, was asked in court the following year if he lived with ‘a woman known as Queen Anne in Church Street, Soho,’ the reply was ‘No, it is a man. Perhaps you will see him later on’ (in Montgomery Hyde Cleveland Street Scandal , 1976). in Dict. of Invective (1991) 3: The unnamed hero of Owen Wister’s The Virginian does not mind it when his friend Steve affectionately calls him a ‘son-of-a-______’ (the dash is in the original, 1902), but when the bad man, Trampas, addresses him this way, he draws his pistol and produces the immortal reply: ‘When you call me that, smile!’. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 154: The oldest of these seems to be camera freak, dated to 1906 by a correspondent of William Safire’s (New York Times, 2/15/81). ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 272: no-good. A worthless person or thing; the modern form (OED, 1908) of good-for-nothing and ne’er-do-well. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 272: Nookie has been dated to 1928; it is used in Front Page , by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, which opened that year. ref. in 1989 Dict. of Invective (1991) 338: By 1949, Jack Benny was using it in a more general sense on the radio: ‘Don’t be such an apologetic schnook’ (Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 1975). ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 141: An effete, overdressed man, as in Fancy Pants (film 1950). in Dict. of Invective (1991) 31: A bag is not necessarily a [...] bag woman in the sense used by Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Democrat, New York) on March 6, 1960, when he brought a million-dollar libel suit upon himself by identifying Esther James as a bag woman for the police, meaning she collected bribes for them from gamblers. ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 80: This last [i.e. chickenshit] is sometimes euphemized as C.S., chicken stuffing, or just plain chicken, as in George Gobel’s plaint, ‘How do you get out of this chicken outfit?’ (TV show, 2/28/60). ref. in Dict. of Invective (1991) 94: There is the white sheriff in the film Mississippi Burning (1988) who declares in the vernacular of the rural South in the 1960s that NAACP stands for ‘Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums’. Dict. of Invective (1991) 92: [The weather] may be described as being as cold as hell, as cold as a witch’s tit, or cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Dict. of Invective (1991) 45: Common current forms include a bitch [...] as in ‘Frank got drunk as a bitch today’. Dict. of Invective (1991) 309: Variations on this theme, all casting the event in terms of an accident, include [...] break a leg, and break a leg above the knee. Dict. of Invective (1991) 53: To blow up is to lose one’s temper, as is to blow a fuse or a gasket and to blow [one’s] top or cork or stack or wig. Dict. of Invective (1991) 276: old cocker (or gaffer or fart). An old man, especially a silly or senile one; often as alter kocker [...] frequently abbreviated to A.K. Dict. of Invective (1991) 26: ass-kisser. A sycophant, a brown-noser; often abbreviated A.K. Dict. of Invective (1991) 279: Other generics include: Abe and Abie, a Jew and Jewess. Dict. of Invective (1991) 279: Other generics include: Abe and Abie, a Jew and Jewess.