Only last week, a colleague was bemoaning the fact that the word “rotter” had disappeared from common usage. I couldn’t help but agree.
And then glory be – at lunch on Sunday, one of the other guests described a colleague at another newspaper as an “absolute rotter”. Suffice it to say the man who used the joyous phrase was of a certain vintage and knew the withering worth of the word. Such was the venom with which he uttered it that it was abundantly clear that the guilty party was of the very lowest order. I was only disappointed that he didn’t go on to describe his erstwhile workmate as a cad, a bounder and an absolute shower, à la Terry-Thomas.
Compare and contrast with Vladimir Putin labelling Sergei Skripal a “scumbag”. To my mind, that’s just cheap name-calling, not perhaps that we should be surprised, given the source and the pantomime surrounding the Salisbury sightseers and their subsequent unmasking.
Perhaps Putin should have taken a leaf out of the playbook of Kim Jong-un, whose description of Donald Trump as a “dotard” was at once withering and elegant. (Kim, of course, was speaking in Korean. “Dotard” was the official English translation provided by state news agency KCNA for the Korean word, which literally translates as “old lunatic”.) No, Putin’s style is altogether coarser and thus less potent.
Another word whose disappearance I lament is “twerp”. Or at least I did until recently, when a columnist laid into Ian McEwan thus: “McEwan has written some fine books. As a political thinker, he is a twerp.” That’s the spirit. Perhaps all is not lost. Let us hope that such fine old and redolent words of condemnation haven’t entirely been consigned to history.
• Jonathan Bouquet is an Observer columnist
