Compound pejoratives online – from buttface to wankpuffin Dirty words are, let’s face it, a lot of fun. If you want to express your dislike for someone and a standard insult like “jerk” or “moron” won’t cut it, you can get creative. There are a few reliable recipes for forming derogatory noun-noun compounds in English. For example: * Start with a word for a disgusting or worthless substance * Add a word for an agglomeration or container Hence, dirtwad, scumbag, pissbucket, snotwagon… (In case it’s not yet clear, this post will contain a lot of bad words. Most are merely silly or crude, but some are more seriously offensive) Alternatively, -head, -face, and -brain(s) are incredibly versatile suffixes, which can be preceded by just about any taboo word. The truly creative can go outside the box with oddball constructions like fucktrumpet, or wankpuffin, which perhaps succeed more by their euphony than their ability to invoke any coherent image. If only we had some concrete data on how these pieces fit together… Introducing the compound pejorative matrix above! This matrix only shows less than 10% of the full dataset of ~4,800 possible compounds (warning: linked file contains very offensive language!). Dataset and code are on GitHub: https://github.com/colinm.. Credit: Colin Morris #Data is beautiful #DANK MEMES