The day after the Brexit referendum our dear leader – then candidate for the presidency – was on his way to Scotland to re-open a golf course. As soon as he landed he tweeted: 

The response was fast and furious – an impressive torrent of inventive invective and obscenity that kept Twitter amused for days as the true significance of the self-inflicted Brexit wound began to sink in. Look right for a sampling of the response.

There were others – many others, the most famous of which was perhaps: 

Scotland voted to stay & plan on a second referendum, you tiny fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon.

— Hamfisted Bun Vendor (@MetalOllie) June 24, 2016 (This account has been subsequently suspended.)

I’m not sure what some of these expressions are supposed to mean – what is a “fuck nugget” when its at home? Others are straight out of English literature with additional coloring – “Apricot Hell Beast.”

But many are as perfect as they are nonsensical – “weapon’s grade plum” for example.   

Shitgibbon predates Trump but will probably now be long associated with the marmalade moron.

The BumTrumpet

It’s pretty clear what a Bum Trumpet is particularly with the understanding that in the UK a bum is a backside and a trump is a fart.

Illuminated medieval manuscripts have a number of marginal images to help the imagination.

Flyting and Kenning

There’s an old English and Norse tradition of flyting –  verbal dueling – the flinging down of traded insults as entertainment that traditionally ended with drinks all round. Think of the slanging match between Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1.2.iv. for example. Gansta rap feuds, playing the dozens, signifying have a long history. 

This Twitter explosion was more of a free-for-all piling-on – a venting of strong feeling, an opportunity for over-the-top linguistic display.

And many of these expressions are kennings.

It seems we are living in a new golden age of kenning, at least in terms of insults. 

OK, so what is a kenning?

Kennings are wordplay. At their best draw attention to knowledge and assumptions that bring a richness to the language creating mental pictures that can lend freshness and depth of meaning. At their worst they are trite and over-extenuated – creating distance, obfuscation or sentimentality rather than imaginative substance.

The easiest way to understand them might be to think of a few modern examples where two nouns are compounded into one as metaphor to describe and stand in for a person or a thing,

Here are a few in common use: pen-pusher, gas guzzler, coffin-dodger, skyscraper, bookworm, rug-rat, ankle-biter, show-stopper, tree-hugger. Some have been in common use so long we no longer even hear or see the metaphor. The kenning hwælweg (whale road – aka the sea) appears in more than one Old English poem suggesting it was in common use at the time.

The word ‘kenning’ comes from the Old Norse verb að kenna, which means ‘to describe’ or ‘to understand’. The verb to ken is still in common use in parts of the UK to mean “know” and it’s found in the old song “D’ye ken John Peel?”

Kennings join nouns to create a new alternative word or phrase that evokes new thinking and fires the imagination. By linking words in this way, poets were able to play and experiment with the rhythm, sounds and imagery. The technique may also have helped with memorization – an important component in the oral tradition where poetry and stories had to be committed to memory rather than being immediately written down.

Beowulf contains hundreds of kennings.

bone-house (bānhūs ) – the human body

beadolēoma (battle-light) – sword

wave-floater (wægflota) – ship

Kennings help us find new ways of looking at things and to question associations and habits of mind. Until they become cliches and dead, they help us look at things differently. They can function as a mental challenge – a puzzle or riddle to be resolved before we move along. They make us say: OK – so what does that mean? Where does that come from? I never thought about it like that before. That’s a new angle. Sometimes all in the blink of an eye as we move along to the next line. Sometimes we might have to pause and puzzle it out. How they really work in the brain and imagination is probably a study for cognitive science. 

Here’s an example of the way they can work. The human body, for example, is described in terms of something else – a bone-house. The word ‘house’ is known as the base word. The other part, the first noun, ‘bone’, is called the determinant and provides the key clue to the meaning. A house provides a structure and a home. Bones don’t live in a house they are in the body. Hence a bone-house is a home for the bones – i.e. body.

Two other examples to tease out:  heofon-candel ‘sky candle’ for sun and fyrenðearfe – ‘fire-need’ for comfort.

And of course the hero’s name is a kenning. A wulf/wolf is a hunter. It is modified by beo – bee, He is the bee hunter. I.e. Bear.  It’s a metaphor, a circumlocution, that tells us about the man..

Beowulf is a poem about a fearless hero who sails across the sea to battle with monstrous enemies. The kennings – about the sea, ships, armor, battle, monsters, warriors, honor – reflect that.

Beowulf is a fearless hero-savior and his story is set in an aristocratic, long ago, warrior, sea-faring society where the bonds of loyalty, honor and physical courage were prized. 

The Mandrake Mymmerkin

Trump, of course, is the unBeowulf – a morally unmoored, corrupt, self-serving, vulgar boor – all qualities that Carol Ann Duffy makes clear in her poem ‘Swearing-In’.

Carol Ann Duffy is the outgoing Poet Laureate of the UK and this is a parting shot from her last collection of poems as laureate. And “Swearing’ is stuffed with an assortment of trumpy kennings old and new. 

combover, twitter-rat, tweet-twat, tripe-gob, muckspout, tie-treader and one to resonate with the middle ages: mandrake mymmerkin’ – which can be politely translated as ‘an undeveloped child-like man’. Welcome to the White House. 

It’s included in her new collection Sincerity. Most of the poems are not political but this next one is, and it’s scathing about the jet-setter lifestyles of the ministerial rich and infamous overlords of Brexit.

The Ex-Ministers

They rise above us, the ex-ministers,
in private jets, left wing, right wing, drop low
to Beijing, Kuwait, the Congo, Kazakhstan;
their deals and contracts in the old red boxes, for sentimental reasons.

Beyond our shores, they float on superyachts, Nostrovia!, 
guests of the mortal gods; the vague moon a Bitcoin.
We are nothing to them now; lemmings
going over the white cliffs of Dover.

And when they are here, they are unseen; 
chauffeured in blacked-out cars to the bars 
in the heavens – far, glittering shards – to look down on our lucrative democracy.

Though they have bought the same face, 

so they will know each other.

– Carol Ann Duffy

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.
We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.
There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes,
A wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes.
This terror of the hall-troops had come far.
A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on
As his powers waxed and his worth was proved.
In the end each clan on the outlying coasts
Beyond the whale-road had to yield to him 
And begin to pay tribute. That was one good king.

The beginning of Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney.