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Describe Your Least Favorite Ex to a Lawyer
Create an adult vocabulary in your target language with this childish exercise
I feel a perhaps toxic sense of satisfaction when I get to use one of my favorite insults, self-aggrandizing. Even reading it on my computer screen zhuzhed up my mood a bit.
An insult seems especially delicious when it sounds sophisticated — I still remember a co-worker from my first real job who frustratingly called another colleague a troglodyte. So much more refined than cave dweller, don’t you think? Almost two decades later, I still haven’t had the opportunity to use this term, but it’s locked and loaded.
While I know enough bad words in French and Spanish to curse somebody out with a bit of gusto, vulgar language just doesn’t have the same sting. As some of us learned from a famous New Yorker cartoon, “Son, if you can’t say something nice, say something clever but devastating.”
A wonderful stage a lot of us language learners eventually get to is being frustrated with not being able to describe certain people, who we have certain feelings about, in a way they deserve to be described. “Sí… fue un hombre… malo.”
Time to move beyond that into zingers that would make the writers of The Golden Girls proud.
