Avoiding Facebook Jail: Insult Creatively

If William Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be quite old and would likely have retired by now. Well, he isn't alive, and I fit the rest of the description. 

In addition to those similarities, Shakespeare was a smart ass who made his points regarding the sitting royalty and celebrities of the day through creative insults about characters that were similar to them, but who were not them. It would leave those he insulted in the awkward position of claiming a villain or oaf in a play was really them because of the similarities, or to point out the contrasts and laugh off the similarities as 'Billy S. just keeping it real.'

Creative insulting is different than the example I provided in the last lesson to give you plausible deniability. If you don't recall, or to catch you up, it was replacing letters with symbols that are strategically placed so that other words can be made from the exposed letters. Specifically, "wh**e *r*iler *r*s*" might mean "white trailer trash," but it might also mean "whale broiler crisp." If asked why you felt the need to cover that phrase up, you can confess your respect for animal rights organizations.

Insulting creatively is saying exactly what you intend to say, but to say it in a way that inspires others to think, or perhaps even say aloud, "I wish I had said that." Though you can't say the exact words others have said that you wish you had, the clever thought that is behind the words is something you can use with other words to say something similarly clever but also substantially different.

One of the techniques I employ when debating a foe within community guidelines is to describe an undesirable action, and then to project that action into my insult such that even the insultee might laugh. If you don't know what that means, it is a natural reaction people have to humor and comedy that tickles their funny bones. I recently used the technique to persuade someone in a political discussion that his view would be different if he pulled his head out of his ass. 

Instead of saying it like that, I channeled my inner-Billy S. something like this: "If you would consider the democratic socialist who I support, you, too, would get Medicare for All. That would include colonoscopies which would allow a doctor to examine you rather than you having to look for yourself and seemingly confusing it with your worldview."

Another creative way to insult someone that will confuse the bots if reported is to insult bad racists creatively with synonyms. Rather than my friend Bryan using the term "white trailer trash," neither "bleached mobile home garbage" or "faded towed-RV waste materials" are widely regarded as negative terms for racist white people. It isn't even accurate, and so it does not unfairly demean the many good white people who actually live in trashy trailers.

This is a good time to dust off those old thesauruses . . . or maybe thesauri . . . whichever is the plural of thesaurus. If this seems more natural to me than it would to you, I probably inherited a gene from my dear, sweet maternal grandmother, Dobie. Way back in the '60s when I was just a child, she would politely disagree with someone's assessment by saying "el toro poo poo" to convey the message "bullshit."

As a reminder for those who have followed the whole series, and to provide links for those who have not, here is what we have covered so far:

• I explain in My Friend Bryan and Facebook Jail why good racists like he and I are cannot simply call bad racists names like cracker, slave owner, or white trailer trash because everyone knows those are terms used negatively to describe those kinds of people.
• I followed that up with Avoiding Facebook Jail: Who Is Watching You? because it is important to know who your enemies are. You are not up against a bunch of thugs Zuckerberg hired to move you out of his personal compound through eviction. He saves those people to literally do those things. These are bots that are operating on formulas contained in algorithms that are most likely less dangerous than having information on the Clintons.