I Needed a Topic Today . . .

. . . so I looked through old memos I have made to myself in my phone. Months-
and-months ago I entered in the following message: "Son and heir of a mongrel bitch." It took me a while to think of what the hell that meant, but when I entered that, while waiting for the doctor's office to call my name, I was reading a magazine article on the author's favorite swear, his being son of a bitch. Apparently, the phrase is thought to derive from a line in King Lear where some guy named Kent evidently doesn't think too highly of some guy named Oswald, saying to him the following:

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 knave, a 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, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.

So, I urge you to Gancy Up Yourself and say the mongrel line or perhaps another one from this passage to the next a-hole who ticks you off. I rather like "one whom I will beat into a clamorous whining" and "eater of crooked meats." It's very Gancey indeed to threaten insult mo'fo's with Shakespearean quotes.