Daily Archives: May 2, 2025

Sarcasmus

Sarcasmus (sar’kaz’-mus): Use of mockery, verbal taunts, or bitter irony.


“What’s that on top or your head? A bird’s nest? Why don’t you just give it up and accept your hairless crainium? At least you could wear fake hair that matches your eyebrows!”

I was mean. They called me “The Slasher” because I could cut anybody down to size with my buzz-saw insults. Or you could say I was a insult surgeon removing peoples’ self-esteem with my cutting remarks.

I insulted everybody I met within 3 minutes. I had an uncanny ability to see their foibles. I would hurl the insults, making them stick with my sarcastic tone of voice. Often, my attributions were wrong, but I didn’t care. Once I said them, they became a “worry” for my targets.

I told a man his nose looked like a tumor with two holes in it. He covered it with his hand and ran away. I once asked a woman if that was a pair of dice under her sweater. She sat down on the sidewalk and started speaking in tongues. I was so pleased that I asked her out to dinner. She accepted my invitation. I didn’t have much money, so we went to Burger King. Speaking in tongues, she pointed at the menu—clearly, she wanted a cheese whopper, jumbo fries and a large Coke. We sat by the window. She pointed at her sweater and said something in Aramaic, one of the languages I studied in Bible college—Holy Rose College in San Jose, California. She told me her name was Mary and she woke up here in New Jersey two days after her son came back to life and teleported into the sky.

As much as I would’ve liked to believe her, I didn’t. Although she was speaking Aramaic, her story was too far-fetched to be true. I told her so and she lifted up her dress and showed me her stretch marks from her pregnancy. I still didn’t believe her. In fact, she was starting to bother me. I left her at Burger King and headed off to the Middle School. The kids there were easy marks—easily humiliated and ridiculed. I hung out at the entrance to the school bus and hurled insults and rude comments as the kids boarded their bus.

One day, the bus driver got off the bus and beat the crap out of me. He called me a “perv” and called the police. I was charged with “damaging children’s’ self-esteem.”

I am locked up in a psychiatric facility awaiting trial. I am undergoing “nicification“ therapy. It involves singing “The Wheels on the Bus” twice a day and studying and memorizing the “Golden Book of Compliments,” I don’t think I have a chance of reform. I told my cellmate he smelled like a skunk’s ass, and he beat me with his shoe. I spent two days in the infirmary. When I got back to our cell, he asked me to teach him how to be an insulting asshole. I made up a syllabus and classes will start tomorrow with “body shaming.”


Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

The Daily Trope is available on Amazon in paperback under the title of The Book of Tropes for $9.95. It is also available in Kindle format for $5.99.