Society & Culture & Entertainment Languages

How to Rant: Bernard Levin"s All-Purpose Invective



Are you dissatisfied with your local government? Fed up with senior management at your workplace? Sick and tired of the administration at your school or university?

If so, feel free to vent your wrath and exorcise your frustrations by adapting any or all of the 109 insulting adjectives in this powerful invective composed by the late British journalist Bernard Levin.

Although Levin's target was the Conservative government of his day, you'll find that this litany of abuse (a rhetorical strategy known as bdelygmia) can be readily redirected as you see fit.

So rant on (and build your vocabulary in the process). But before sending your diatribe to anyone, please think twice.
I long ago concluded that the present Government was worm-eaten, exhausted, dishonest, incompetent, lazy, mendacious, ignorant, rotten, false, disreputable, deceitful, unsavoury, squalid, abominable, soiled, piratical, shifty, discreditable, infamous, improper, obscene, hateful, impure, degraded, dilapidated, shabby, grovelling, discredited, renownless, tarnished, disgraced, shameless, creeping, abject, two-faced, unscrupulous, villainous, treacherous, untrustworthy, prevaricating, sinister, crawling, insincere, fishy, spurious, unclean, felonious, infamous, venal, base, vile, bribable, rancid, disloyal, scheming, unsavoury, sickening, fetid, nauseating, putrid, defaulting, mouldering, evil, vicious, damnable, maleficent, wrong, ineffectual, mean, inferior, contemptible, superficial, irrelevant, expendable, powerless, pathetic, nugatory, impotent, jumped-up, cheap, insalubrious, flea-ridden, unsound, nasty, baneful, foul-tonged, cursed, unwarranted, execrable, damned, abnormal, unreasonable, virtueless, peccant, sinful, unworthy, hopeless, incorrigible, tergiversating, brutalised, nefarious, culpable, scandalous, worthless, flagitious, gross, indefensible and unpardonable to say the least.
("3,000 Cheers for a Man Who Can End This Sorry Era," The Times, September 23, 1994)


To read more of Levin's lively prose, see Bernard Levin on Writers and Writing and "From the Carpentry Shop to the Forge."

And for more examples of effective ways to vent your spleen, see Bdelygmia: The Perfect Rant.
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