Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Dog as an Insult
A kerfuffle erupted when the U.S. president called a disloyal former aide a dog. The insult is as old as Homer and the Bible, although surely the president didn't borrow the insult from either of those sources.
For Homer, see Margaret Graver, "Dog-Helen and Homeric Insult," Classical Antiquity 14.1 (April, 1995) 41-61, who cites, among many passages, Iliad 1.158-160 (Achilles to Agamemnon; tr. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt):
I've been rereading Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), who writes (p. 105, with notes on p. 341):
Update — I have just learned from a confidential source that the text of the president's tweet actually read:
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For Homer, see Margaret Graver, "Dog-Helen and Homeric Insult," Classical Antiquity 14.1 (April, 1995) 41-61, who cites, among many passages, Iliad 1.158-160 (Achilles to Agamemnon; tr. A.T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt):
But you, shameless one, we followed here in order to please you,On the Latin side, I don't have access to Ilona Opelt, Die Lateinischen Schimpfwörter und verwandte sprachliche Erscheinungen: Eine Typologie (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1965).
seeking to win recompense for Menelaus and for you, dogface,
from the Trojans. This you do not regard or take thought of.
ἀλλὰ σοί, ὦ μέγ᾿ ἀναιδὲς, ἅμ᾿ ἑσπόμεθ᾿ ὄφρα σὺ χαίρῃς,
τιμὴν ἀρνύμενοι Μενελάῳ σοί τε, κυνῶπα,
πρὸς Τρώων· τῶν οὔ τι μετατρέπῃ οὐδ᾿ ἀλεγίζεις.
I've been rereading Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), who writes (p. 105, with notes on p. 341):
The Eastern view of dogs as filthy scavengers had been transmitted via the Bible to medieval England and was still widely current in the sixteenth century. The Book of Revelation suggested that at the Resurrection dogs, like other unclean beings, would be excluded from the New Jerusalem. Some commentators thought this meant 'men of dogged impudency and maliciousness',47 but most took it literally. Chaucer has nothing good to say about the dog and neither has Shakespeare. In popular proverbs there was no suggestion that the dog might be faithful and affectionate; instead, we have 'as greedy as a dog', 'a surly as a butcher's dog', and 'a dog's life'.48 Fine ladies, observed the Elizabethan Thomas Muffett, hated lice, even 'more than dogs and vipers'49 The dog, said a Jacobean preacher, was an emblem of greed and shamelessness: 'a most unclean and filthy creature which goeth publicly and promiscuously to generation'. Dogs were filthy beastly, quarrelsome creatures, agreed the sectary George Foster.50 In 1662 the preacher Thomas Brooks classified dogs with 'vermin', and in eighteenth-century painting the dog frequently remained a symbol of man's baser parts: he represented gluttony, lust, coarse bodily functions and general disruptiveness. 'In all countries and languages,' declared a mid-eighteenth-century author, '"Dog" is a name of contempt.'51
47. Revelation, xxii.15; Thomas Brightman, The Revelation of St John Illustrated (4th edn, 1644), 888.
48. Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts (Kent State U.P., 1971), 161; Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, 1935), 195-9; Tilley, Dictionary of the Proverbs, 163, 74, 168; F. Edward Hulme, Proverb Lore (1902), 164.
49. Mouffet, Theater of Insects, 1093.
50. Francis Rollenson, Sermons preached before his Maiestie (1611), 59-60; John Weemse, An Exposition of the Second Table of the Moral! Law (1636), 163; George Foster, The Pouring Forth of the Seventh and Last Viall (1650), 21.
51. Thomas Brooks, The Crown & Glory of Christianity (1662), 54. See Ronald Paulson, Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth (1979), chap. 5.
Update — I have just learned from a confidential source that the text of the president's tweet actually read:
When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn't work out. I mean 'Οὐκ ἔστιν καλὸν λαβεῖν τὸν ἄρτον τῶν τέκνων καὶ βαλεῖν τοῖς κυναρίοις'. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!
