The delicate art of insults in a post-politeness age

We learn to swear before we learn to talk properly - a habit that goes on for life. If you are a politician in the modern age, you have even more chance to perfect the skill thanks to your inner instincts of competitiveness and the not-so-silent majority ready to applaud or retweet your nastiness.

In a recent presentation at Dokuz Eylül University, one of the students asked what I thought of today's political rhetoric, both in Turkey and abroad. 

It is a difficult question, which does not simply end with referring to modern times as the "post-politeness era." Political insults and put-downs have been around for a long time. However, actual swear words are rarer, such as when Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte called Barack Obama the "son of a whore."

Early vocabulary, lifelong habit

According to "Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing," a guide published by the Oxford University Press, the average child learns at least one swear word by the age of two. Around the age of three or four, the habit takes off and children pick up any "bad word" that is uttered around them. By the time you get to establish your own family, you have already developed the habit of using an average of 0.7 to 3 percent swear words in daily conversation, according to the book. 

As in other areas of life, frequency does not necessarily lead to creativity or originality. Most swear words fall into three categories - religious blasphemy, excrement and sexual acts. In other words, unless you are Shakespeare or Turkey's foul-mouthed poet Can Yücel, the four letter words that we mostly use are just that: Four letter words of utter simplicity.

Creative insults

Çetin Altan, a recently deceased...