h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Bloody whingers!

Turkeys!

It usually means loud, officious, self-important.
Easily applied to over-zealous bureaucrats.
But it may be too American.

~jwf~

Some of it would depend on who the people doing the insulting actually are...

"Bloody foreigners" works for anyone, but given the people are apparently on a ship, then if there's any kind of RN connection behind them then the word 'muppet' would be quite good... (with or without the 'bloody'.

Do you want an actual racial epithet? I'm not even sure which one would apply to Turks.

W
O
G
S
?

They start at Calais, so I'm told, so it's not region specific.

Period-appropriate epithets are a tricky one, from two angles. On the one hand, a period-appropriate insult might sound to modern ears strange, jarring, or even quaintly mild. Alternatively, it might sound jarringly modern - it *would* be period appropriate for a cowboy to refer to a lawman as a "pig", apparently, but you'd never use that in a story because the character would sound like he was from the 1970s instead of the 1870s. The audience's ignorance makes that the wrong choice artistically even if it's appropriate factually.

~*~Do you want an actual racial epithet?~*~

Oh, no, heavens not. Something akin to "Bloody tart" was what I was looking for. I only don't use that because they're obviously not women.

Fair enough.

I echo "jobsworths", in that case.

If you'd like a wackier word, may I submit "gauleiter", which is a German word that meant something like "provincial governor" but now means any overbearing, officious and arrogant functionary and has nicely anti-foreign connotations and underlying references to the Nazis.

Beef is not the only meat that can be jerked.
So jerky turkeys would work.
Or turkey jerks. Or jerk Turks.
Or turkey jerkies.

Too American perhaps?


~jwf~

Too obscure for an American audience. No one would get it.

Sorry, I assumed you were aiming at a reasonably literate and intellectually developed audience.

If you have to keep it so simple even Americans can understand it, probably best to go with "foreigners". Americans know what foreigners are, and understand that they're
(a) all the same and
(b) bad.

I expect almost no one outside of Germany would get it, Snobbish One. There's no cause to be insulting.

Amateurs would fit too.

Idiots always goes well.

Modern day you'd also use Muppets.

Hoovooloo



Wow...'we' have something in common with the Yanks, shame they are foreign.

Dunno if w.ogs is right.

Wouldn't they be r.agheads?

In the 1890s (See HGWells and others)
all Muslims were called Turks. This no
doubt a residue of the Ottoman Empire
which ruled most of the Muslim whirled,
and remained the traditional nemesis of
the Western Christian whirled.

~jwf~

May I just say that I've never ever heard about that German insult you mentioned?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s4BqzHEK6o&feature=endscreen

Ah, yes, which may be the reason why I never really heard a German say it.

You should mention that on Useless Facts, jwf.