A Handy Guide to Ruffians, Rapscallions, Cads & More
22 Charming Words for Nasty People
Definition:
a brutal person; bully
Examples:
'You try me too much. A ruffian - a common brawling ruffian - that's what you have become.'
- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, 1912
She marries a lawyer she doesn’t love, a man who diverges in every way from her “usual muesli mix of art-damaged ruffians.”
— Molly Young, The New York Times, 29 Jun. 2022
About the Word:
Ruffians specialize in roughness, and between the 16th and 18th centuries, they were also synonymous with pimps - men who solicit clients for prostitutes.
Definition:
a captious critic
Examples:
Let the grumbling smellfungi of this world, who cultivate taste among books, cobwebs, and spiders, rail at the extravagance of the age.
- Washington Irving (writing as Anthony Evergreen), Salmagundi, 1820
About the Word:
Our language contains a glorious profusion of words for critics of all stripes. We have terms for an inferior critic (criticaster), a jealous critic (zoilus), and a severe critic (aristarch). None of them has quite the same bite as smellfungus, a lovely morsel of an insult, which comes from the name of a character in Laurence Sterne's 1768 book, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.
Definition:
a mischievous and often morally corrupt person
Examples:
The captain of Company L refused to recognize us; said we were deserters, and traitors, and scalawags; and when he drew rations for Company L from the commissary, he wouldn't give us any."
- Jack London, The Road, 1907
While not as nerve-racking as some of the other daredevil productions, but no less captivating, is Anchors Aweigh Parade — a fun, high-seas spectacle with scalawags, swashbucklers, fleets and flotillas.
— Domhnall O’Donoghue, Belfast Telegraph, 4 Jun. 2022
About the Word:
Also spelled scallywag, this term may originally have referred to an animal of very little value. After the Civil War, scalawag came to describe a white Southerner acting in support of reconstruction governments, often in pursuit of private gain; it was used to insult Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind.
The origin of scalawag is unknown, but one theory suggests there's a link to the Scottish scoloc, a first-born son given to the Church to educate.
Definition:
a tricky deceitful fellow
Examples:
A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave ..."
— William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1605-6
A nadir was reached when the cash-strapped Lloyd George began selling peerages to those the king regarded as cads, knaves and blackguards.
— Simon Heffer, The Telegraph (London, Eg.), 6 Nov. 2021
About the Word:
The Bard was particularly fond of the word knave - it crops up throughout his plays. One of the oldest words in English, knave comes from the Old English cnafa, meaning "boy" or "male servant."
Definition:
rascal; an idle worthless person
Examples:
The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
Rather, Bowie’s pronouncements, and his charmingly flippant parrying of the ignorant questions of interviewers, seem like the playful, clearly insincere braggadocio of a young rapscallion still finding himself.
— Caspar Salmon, The Daily Beast, May 24 2022
About the Word:
There are no scallions in rapscallion. Rapscallion is an alteration of rascallion, which is itself an irregular formation of rascal, a term born in an Old French dialect word meaning "to scrape, clean off."
Definition:
a seeming friend who is secretly an enemy
Examples:
One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel;A fiend, a fury, pitiless and rough;A wolf, nay, worse, a fellow all in buff;A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermandsThe passages of alleys, creeks and narrow lands.
- William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors, 1623
About the Word:
The enemy posing as a friend has been a common enough creature that we have had a word for it for five hundred years or so. More recently, we’ve seen a rise in usage of the portmanteau frenemy ("one who pretends to be a friend but is actually an enemy.")
Although frenemy is of far more recent vintage than backfriend, it is not a creation of the 21st century. Frenemy can be found as far back as 1891, when the Norton, Kansas newspaper The Norton Champion published an article that included the following: "During an hour's wily interview, he permitted us to surmise that while not in the hands of his frienemies himself, it is an opportunity freighted with big import so shelf-worn politicians and subsidized statesmen will not be forced to run for office against their professed wishes."
Definition:
an insignificant anonymous writer
Examples:
Rail away, my little libellous anonymuncule.
- W. Lynd, The Gentleman's Magazine, Sept., 1882
About the Word:
We often hear today of the many ways that the Internet has changed social discourse, some number of which are exaggerated. One thing that the Internet has certainly done is to give rise to a burgeoning class of anonymuncules. We are inundated with such creatures, both in the comment sections of articles published on the web, and through various forms of social media, such as Twitter.
The word is a blend of anonymous and homunculus ("a little man").
Definition:
a morally corrupt or depraved person
Examples:
You are a heartless reprobate, sir; a heartless, thankless, good-for-nothing reprobate. I have done with you. You are my son; that I cannot help - but you shall have no more part or parcel in me as my child, nor I in you as your father.
- Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, 1857
At the time, his directorial efforts included intimate short films (including the Oscar-nominated "Two Cars, One Night") and features like "Boy," an affectionate, coming-of-age tribute to his upbringing in a rural Maori community, about a child enthralled by his charmingly reprobate father (played by Waititi, of course).
— Dave Itzkoff, New York Times, 3 Jul. 2022
About the Word:
Reprobate comes from the Latin reprobare, meaning "to disapprove" or "to condemn." The word is frequently used in the King James Version of the Bible to describe someone who understands God's will but chooses to not follow it.
Definition:
a credulous person; especially : one who believes everything he or she hears
Examples:
The Gobemouche abounds in clubs, coffee-houses, Capel Courts, Bellamy's, and all old women's tea-parties.
- Punch, or the London Charivari, 1857
About the Word:
Gobemouche is evidence that certain unpleasant things, when cloaked in the veneer of French, can sound rather pleasant. The word rolls off the tongue easily, and sounds quite lovely; however, if we look at the etymology it more or less translates to "fly gulper" (from the French gober, meaning "to swallow whole", and mouche, meaning "fly").
Definition:
a spoiled child
Examples:
O, you are a meere mammothrept in judgement then.
- Ben Jonson, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson, 1616
About the Word:
Mammothrept comes to the English language from the Greek word mammothreptos, which means, delightfully enough, "child brought up by his grandmother".
It hardly matters whether children raised by a grandmother are indeed more likely to be spoiled; such a fine and descriptive word as mammothrept deserves to be used to describe spoiled children regardless of who has raised them.
Definition:
a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another's feelings or rights
Examples:
'You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you rotter!'
- James Jyce, Ulysses, 1922
But the version of Kroc, portrayed so brilliantly by Michael Keaton in the film, is also a cut-throat, a drunk and an utter cad.
— Karl Quinn, Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, Aus.), 19 Nov. 2016
About the Word:
One of the few gender-specific terms on this list, cad is a shortening of caddie, a Scottish term for one who waits around for odd jobs. (This sense of the term eventually developed into the golfing sense of caddie.) These days, cad is commonly linked to romantic misbehavior.
Definition:
a bigoted adherent to exposed but customary error
Examples:
A tough carrion, she draws like a Whirl-pool, and would kill a Man as easily as a Cat sucks the breath of a Child: Go thy ways old Mumpsimus, the mark's in thy mouth still.
- Thomas Duffett, Psyche Debauch'd, 1678
About the Word:
The ostensible origin of mumpsimus is that long ago there was an illiterate priest who was in the habit of using this word when saying mass, rather than the correct Latin word sumpsimus (which means "we have taken"). When confronted with this error, the priest was reported to have said that he refused to change his old mumpsimus for the new sumpsimus offered by his critic.
Definition:
a reckless unprincipled person; an incorrigible rascal
Examples:
He refused ever to work, borrowed money on his father's credit, which he never returned, passed bad checks; was, in short, an out-and-out good-for-nothing scapegrace.
— Helen Warburton, "Jerry" in The Smart Set, January 1916
Onscreen, Temple has a pouty, childlike presence and a slightly feral quality, like a girl raised by some very emotionally available wolves. Her affect evokes old-timey words — scamp, scapegrace, minx. (Hunt described her as “a pip.”)
— Alexandra Soloski, The New York Times, 28 Jul. 2021
About the Word:
Scapegrace may come from the notion of escaping (scape meaning "to escape") the grace of God. However serious that sounds, scapegrace, like scamp, is often used lightheartedly.
Definition:
a stupid awkward person
Examples:
It's this that marks our senseless tawpies, And shames us a' as Gillygaupies
- Hector MacNeill, Bygane Times, and Late Come Changes, 1811
About the Word:
It is an indisputable fact that some people are stupid, and we have a great number of words with which to describe them (birdbrain, blockhead, dummy, etc.). A further number of people are awkward, and we likewise have many words to choose from when describing them (bungler, klutz, and so on).
But what of the person who manages to be both stupid and awkward? Well, that person is a gillygaupus. Now you know.
Definition:
a usually young man who does noisy and violent things as part of a group or gang; hoodlum
Examples:
When Billy Windsor had mentioned the gangs, he had formed a mental picture of low-browed hooligans, keeping carefully to their own quarter of the town.
- P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith, Journalist, 1915
English mobs storming mosques, marching like hooligans, or intruding on the private property of Muslims, essentially taking the law into their own hands, with little to zero punitive action from authorities.
— Tehrab Times (Tehran, Ir.), 28 Jun. 2022
About the Word:
This word may be eponymous: Patrick Hooligan was an Irish-born ruffian who attained notoriety (and who died in prison) in London shortly before the turn of the 20th century. It's still associated with Britain, where "football hooliganism" is sometimes referred to as the "English disease."
Definition:
an absurdly argumentative person
Examples:
Whats here, chop logicke. - William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, 1597
Choplogic has two meanings, and can refer to either "excessively complex and often specious argumentation," or to the kind of person who engages in such.
About the Word:
The word was formed by a combination of logic and an obsolete sense of chop meaning "to bandy words, answer back."
You should be warned that knowing what to call such a person will in no way alleviate your displeasure should you have to deal with one.
Definition:
rascal; rogue
Examples:
'Not by my will,' said Mr. Vincy. 'I shall have enough to do this year, with an idle scamp of a son, without paying for wedding-clothes.'
- George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871-2
It’s a sign of the alternate reality we have warped into that Eminem — the lovable scamp who made his career motor-mouthing fantasies of murdering his ex-wife, shooting up clubs and assaulting strippers — is now pitching gun safety legislation and get-out-the-vote drives.
— Jemayel Khawaja, Variety (Los Angeles, CA), 18 Jan. 2020
About the Word:
Scamp once functioned as a verb meaning "to roam about idly" (think scamper). The noun we've featured here appeared later, and has a more playful overtone than some other words on this list.
Definition:
one belonging to or suited to the lowest moral or economic condition of usually urban civilization : a street urchin
Examples:
She says that when police showed her a picture of Abedi, she was shocked by his youth. She could not see how a “guttersnipe” like him, who didn’t “look old enough to shave”, could have destroyed so many lives.
— Nick Hilton & Sean Ogrady, the Independent 9London, Eng.), 15 Apt. 2022
About the Word:
For many people, guttersnipe conjures up images of a Dickensian waif, some ill-clothed and iller-fed child of the streets, making their way through Victorian London by hook or crook. Which makes sense, in a way, since the works of Charles Dickens are well-populated with guttersnipes.
Dickens, however, seems to have not used the word in any of his writing. There is evidence of the word being used as early as 1824, it initially referred to a pig, and was not in wide use to describe children at the time that Dickens was writing.
Definition:
a base, despicable, or vile person; a miserable person
Examples:
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me. / I once was lost, but now am found, / Was blind but now I see.
- John Newton, Amazing Grace, 1779
No need to apologize to the ungrateful wretch. She made that bed abundantly over the years and is lying in it, griping.
— Newsday, 28 Jun. 2022
About the Word:
Wretch has been part of English about as long as knave. Wretch's Old English ancestor meant "outcast; exile," which raises this question: Did our ancestors exile despicable people, or did those they exile become miserable as a result of their expulsion?
Definition:
a lazy talkative person
Examples:
She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum, A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum.
- Robert Burns, The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, 1807
About the Word:
Blellum combines in its definition two qualities that are not often found together: laziness and loquaciousness. Its origin is uncertain, although it is thought to possibly be a blend of two Scottish words, bleber (to babble), and skellum (a rascal).
Definition:
a mealymouthed sanctimonious hypocrite
Examples:
We therefore protest to-day against these "Mawworms" of the press, who are always indulging in querulous complaints of plagiarism, and all the while are the greatest of literary pilferers.
— The Freemason, 1875
About the Word:
Does the definition for mawworm have a slight ring of personal affront to it? As a rule, a definition should not be clouded by the likes or dislikes of the lexicographer. But perhaps this definer once had a bad run-in with a mawworm?
On the other hand, it is also a fine definition, and very clearly explains what this word means.
Definition:
one that is excessively greedy for money
Examples:
I melt in tears to see the Rebels reignIn Court and City with their hungry train,That like Purse-Leeches in the Lawyers Inn,Sucks others Wealth, to enrich their begging Kin.- G.P., Englands Murthering Monsters, 1660
About the Word:
If you ever find yourself being described with a word that contains "leech" in it, chances are very high that you are not being complimented. One of the things that is enjoyable about a word such as purse-leech is that while it is archaic and obscure, it is also very simple to understand, and requires no additional explanation.
