We look back with an air of smugness at the rules of society that regulated manners in generations past. How quaint. How restrictive. How ridiculous, we opine. We are amused that people would invest time and money to maintain certain social “graces” that often complicated lives to no one’s benefit. So old fashioned. So un-American – at least that would appear to be our frame of mind, judging by what we see in traditional and social media.

Now I’m not against insulting people. I just abhor how mundane our insults are, especially in the political arena. The author of The Art of the Deal hasn’t mastered the art of the insult. There’s no originality. I’m frustrated that the most entertaining attempts at insults in recent political news arose from Sara Palin’s propensity for malapropisms (also referred to as Dogberryism, based on a Shakespearian character in Much Ado About Nothing). The insults hurled across such social media as Facebook also manage to be both intense and dull.

C’mon folks. We can do so much better than that! Let’s use our words, we have so many to choose from. Let’s lace them together to form the affable daggers that make their point as they get to the heart of the matter. To inspire you, consider these lovely literary lances:

“Thou art a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mungril bitch.” – King Lear by Shakespeare

“You blithering idiot! … You festering gumboil! You fleabitten fungus! … You bursting blister! You moth-eaten maggot!” – Mathilda by Raold Dahl

“Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn’t let on.” – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

“If your brains were dynamite there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.” – Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

“He is simply a hole in the air.” – The Lion and the Unicorn by George Orwell

“I misjudged you… You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.” – The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

“He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.” – Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoyevsky

“He’s not human; he’s an empty space disguised as a human” – The Collector by John Fowles

“Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend.” – The Rambler by Samuel Johnson

Finally, though not in a book, Gore Vidal after being punched by Norman Mailer: “I see Norman, words have failed you again!”