SHAKESPEAREAN INSULTS

As a little bit of a "stocking filler", I bought my Beloved a tiny little book of Shakespearean insults for Christmas. Unfortunately, when I picked it up in the actual genuine bookshop, and even when I was wrapping it up later, I didn't actually notice that it was a book of insults, thinking that I'd just got her a little collection of Shakespearean quotations.

So, one evening, and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, because I like to think that I'm rather adorable on occasions (in that slightly weird way I have), I picked up that self-same little book with a view to throwing about some conversational bon mots as we bantered the rest of the day away...

I got the impression that each page would reveal something appropriate to the situation of the moment and much hilarity would ensue.

God, I must be hell to live with...

You know the sort of thinking. It was a train of thought in much the same vein in which bible-ists used to pick up a New English and find that it would fall open at a page upon which their eyes would discover precisely the quotation to solve their immediate problem and go away in the belief that they were getting direct messages from above about how to live their life.

Praise be...

So, anyway... I flicked open a page and read out what it said, and the conversation unfolded as it will and, before you know it, I'd read out five or six of the things and noticed, rather to my growing alarm, that there was a trend developing, and none of the quotations that I'd read out seemed to have been a well-known phrase or saying that seemed in any way to be (or not to be) very positive...

"That's because" dead-panned the Beloved when I finally mentioned that I'd cottoned on to this "It's a book of insults..."

"Ah..."

Well, they do say that ignorance is bliss, although whoever it was who first coined that particular phrase (Thomas Grey I believe) probably hadn't just read out a stream of Elizabethan abuse at their Beloved from a book of insults that they had specifically bought in the flawed belief that it would be somehow endearing…

Two things we have learned from this. The first, I feel, is rather self-explanatory, so I won't insult your intelligence by underscoring it once again, but the second is always, always read the front cover...

You live, you learn...