There are many linguists who firmly believe in the recovery of some old Castilian expressions. We don’t know if this will come to pass, but in the meantime, today we want to bring you back some of the oldest insults in our language.
List of oldest insults
Read carefully this list of the oldest insults in Spanish so that you can insult with elegance or to know when you have to defend yourself…
scratcher
Raspamonedas comes from the Middle Ages, when the money changers filed the edge of the coins to collect kilos and kilos of gold and silver. Thus, to call someone a scratcher is to call them a thief. But not just any thief but a clever thief.
Swallows
How many compound words will we use as an insult! We do it because they sound more aggressive and more “round” so it better vents the feeling of the angry person being insulted. This word comes from the year 1611 approximately and its definition, at this time and written in the Covarrubias Treasury of the Language, explains that it defined very straight men with a “foolish gravity”. Come on, call someone “uptight.”
lettuce
Surely the most veterans are familiar with this word since it was still used in the middle of the 20th century. Lechugino describes a young man who puts on the air of an older person in order to flirt with women older than himself.
Zurumbatic
This word comes from the Portuguese (soombra-sorumbatico) and meant “astonished”. But the insult that we used in Spanish, had nothing to do with astonished, but rather has to do more with a dark person, with bad vibrations (bad shadow) and with some bad temper.
trickster
If you’re a little bad in history, surely you don’t know the Empire of Trabzon, in Asia Minor. It did not last too long either because it was annihilated by the Turks, although Don Quixote had time to dream that they placed the crown on the emperor. Later, cheaters meant those actions that were impractical and were useless and cheaters meant those that only messed things up more and always ended up getting into trouble.
Pisaverde
Pisaverde defined those men who cared too much about their physical appearance and became an excessively coiffed and haughty gallant, although they normally did not have much money. It is what we could define in the 21st century as a metrosexual.
Badulaque
Apart from referring to a market in The Simpsons, it also refers to a somewhat irresponsible, unconscious and foolish person. Although in its origins it referred to a shave that women used to apply to their faces.
Being of the bitter shell
Being from the bitter shell is an expression that changed meaning from the 18th century to the 19th century. In the oldest century it referred to a somewhat hooligan man, but from the next century it would be used to refer to progressives who, according to them, only talked and argued all day but never reached conclusions.