Definition:
Abusive language; discourse that casts blame on somebody or something. One of the progymnasmata. Adverb: invectively.
See also:
- What Is Invective?
- Bdelygmia
- Cursing
- Dozens
- Flyting
- Meiosis
- Snark
- Swear Word
- Taboo Language
- Tapinosis
Etymology:
From the Latin, "to inveigh against"Examples of Invective:
- Coetzee's Fragmented Invective
- Mencken's "Libido for the Ugly"
- On Sadler's Bombastic Declamations, by Thomas Babington Macaulay
Additional Examples:
- "Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering, palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. . . . God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wishwash. Extermine them, slime.
"I could curse for hours and hours--God help me."
(D.H. Lawrence, letter to editor Edward Garnett, July 3, 1912) - "A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir to a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deni'st the least syllable of thy addition."
(Kent addressing Oswald in William Shakespeare's King Lear, II.2) - "[T]his is just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist. You excrement, you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards."
(John Cleese in Monty Python's "The Architect Sketch") - "No one is entirely free of responsibility except perhaps the dead. Not least among them are the libertines of novelty, who promiscuously embrace the new in whatever form just to be on top of the wave. Not only have they institutionalized much of what is harmful, they have cast aside much that is good. The sum of these, their two actions, is a gaping negative that threatens in a decade or two to dissolve the accomplishments of millennia, reordering the ways in which we think, write, and communicate. It would be one thing if such a revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels, but it doesn't. It produces mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom see daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world won't end; women who have lizard tattoos winding from the navel to the nape of the neck; beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch; and an entire race of females, now entering middle age, that speaks in North American Chipmunk and seldom makes a statement without, like, a question mark at the end? What hath God wrought, and why didn't he stop with the telegraph?"
(Mark Helprin, Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto. HarperCollins, 2009)
Observations:
- "Classical invective sought to denigrate an individual on the basis of birth, upbringing, 'mechanical' professions, moral defects, physical shortcomings, and so on. It was a branch of epideictic oratory which aimed at undermining the credibility of a judicial witness or political opponent by impugning his integrity. Accordingly, its realm was that of ethos, or personal character."
(Francesco Petrarca, Invectives, trans. by David Marsh. Harvard Univ. Press, 2003) - "Invective need not be true but only point to real or imagined defects in an enemy's character by comparison with similar defects in shameful stock figures. Cicero himself advises, in cases where an opponent has lived a blameless life or has a long-standing reputation, that an orator could concoct a charge that he has been 'concealing his true character' (De inventione rhetorica, 2.10.34)."
(J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament. Augsburg Fortress, 2006)
Pronunciation: in-VEK-tiv
Also Known As: vituperation
