Some pejoratives insult the speaker rather than the spoken about.
“Dotard” finds itself firmly in the self-defeating, boomerang belittlement pile. We did not hear it until now for that very reason. When we wish to ridicule another we generally do so to deflect the ridicule coming our way, not to add to it. One uses the wrong defamations at great risk of defaming oneself. So, we rarely hear such schoolyard taunts as “snollygoster,” “mooncalf,” and “cacafuego” because the unfortunate who utters them rarely hears the end of it. Even insults inhabit a cruel, survival-of-the-fittest world.
North Korean fatman strongman Kim Jong Un called Donald Trump a “dotard” earlier this week.
That’s a defcon-five, fighting word.
“I am now thinking hard about what response he could have expected when he allowed such eccentric words to trip off his tongue,” Kim remarked regarding Trump’s UN speech. “I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire.”
Contrary to the conclusions of those confused by the peculiar term, Kim did not coin a portmanteau by crashing “dork” into “retard.” Dotard actually comes from Middle English, not Valley Californian. The various dictionaries consulted identified the word as one applied to a foolish, old person in cognitive decline, and, as the reader perhaps guessed, finds an ancestor in “dotage” just as Kim Jong Un finds one in Kim Il Sung. One assumes the 33-year-old wants to convey his youth and vigor and the 71-year-old’s status as a senior citizen with the unique term.
In Kim’s defense, Trump started it. He called the North Korean “rocketman” at the United Nations. That’s not as imaginative as “chain-smoking Communist dwarf,” Pat Buchanan’s famous descriptive for Deng Xiaoping, which also bettered Trump’s insult on accuracy: the late leader inhaled Panda cigarettes as though one of the four food groups, stood five-feet tall (can you go on all the rides at 60 inches?), and killed as a revolutionary Marxist. Kim Jong Un merely betrays a fondness for watching rockets through his binoculars. He cannot say, like another famous rocketman, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,” with any experience buttressing the advice. And if Kim truly is a rocketman, he’s a rocketman of the William Shatner, not Elton John, variety.
Like “dotard,” “rocketman” diminished the speaker looking to diminish. A man who knew and ultimately became Don Rickles can do better. And one who executed musicians striking a discordant note with anti-aircraft guns can do worse.
It’s telling that neither man went for the hair (akin to Hitler and de Gaulle’s secret mustache détente or Anchorman‘s rules for news-team rumbles) on their competing dis tracks. Even saber-rattling leaders know mutually-assured destruction when they see it.