Category Archives: Eugene Ehrlich

Eugene Ehrlich

One of the happiest features of possessing a capacious vocabulary is the opportunity to insult your enemies with impunity. While the madding crowd gets mad with exhausted epithets such as “You rotten pig” and “you dirty bum”, you can acerbate, deprecate, derogate, and excoriate your nemesis with a battalion of laser-precise pejoratives. You can brand him or her a grandiloquent popinjay, venal pettifogger, nefarious miscreant, flagitious recidivist, sententious blatherskite, mawkish ditherer, arrant peculator, irascible misanthrope, hubristic narcissist, feckless sycophant, vituperative virago, vapid yahoo, eructative panjandrum, saturnine misanthrope, antediluvian troglodyte, maudlin poetaster, splenetic termagant, pernicious quidnunc, rancorous anchorite, perfidious mountebank, irascible curmudgeon.

Eugene Ehrlich, The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate, New York, 1997, p. xxiii