Colin Morris noted that on Reddit, a certain form of compound pejoratives—two words such as "buttface", "shitlord", "douchebag"—are found in diverse yet formulaic proliferation. So it's time—with appropriate warnings about the presence of very offensive words—for some data science.
I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, "affixes") that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary's English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains, including:
scatology (fart-, poop-)
political epithets (lib-, Trump-)
food (-waffle, -burger)
body parts (butt-, -face, -head, -brains)
gendered epithets (bitch-, -boy)
animals (dog-, -monkey)
One of the charts (the "Matrix of Pejoration", above) is particularly fascinating. It reminds me of versions of the periodic table which chart the halflives of nucleides. To illustrate, for example, the hypothesized Island of Stability made of undiscovered superheavy elements.
Here, though, there are peculiar troughs of disuse where words popular in one or two specific combinations are never used at all with others. It appears no-one has ever used the words "dipgoblin", "libnozzle" and "wankclown", for example, despite them being excellent insults.
Moreover, some combinations are in extremely wide use—millions of instances!—yet cannot be found in the dictionary. The OED needs to get on "shitrag", ""assbag" and "titfucker," pronto.
I cringe at little but something that gets to me are the "clever" Britishesque ones. You know, stuff like "cockwomble".
