When Did People Start Calling Each Other “Poopy Head”?
In an interview with CBS News Monday morning, anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist said that President Obama won the 2012 election by portraying Mitt Romney as a “poopy head.” When did people start calling each other “poopy head”?
The 1980s, roughly. People have been calling each other names like block-head, stupid-head, and bone-head for more than a hundred years, but it’s only in the last few decades that poopy-head joined the ranks of children’s favorite insults. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, blockhead is as old as a 16th century translation of the Bible, in which a passage in 1 Corinthians is translated to describe “A blockeheade that hathe loste the iudgemente of nature.” Stupid-head, meanwhile, is at least as old as Dickens: In Oliver Twist, the bumbling police officer Blathers asks the butler Giles, “Think it’s the same boy, stupid-head?” Bone-head, knuckle-head, and dick-head are all 20th century inventions that also predate poopy-head, according to the written record.
Grover Norquist says Obama won by calling Romney a