by Kevin Burton
If you’re not good at gardening, you can say that you have a “brown thumb.” You can say it, I won’t.
Yes the antonym of “green thumb” which speaks to people who are good at gardening is “brown thumb.” But that sounds much worse than it needs to, so I’ll just say, quite truthfully, I stink at gardening.
Actually my wife Jeannette calls being bad at gardening having a “black thumb,” “the kiss of death.” That I believe to be the better term, though it’s no more pleasant for the plants involved.
The fine folks at Merriam-Webster Dictionary have thumbed through their list of plant names and cultivated some that sound like insults, if you spit them out just right.
I am better at insults than gardening (I came up with “flutterhead” for someone who is not so bright), but I’m trying to put that behind me.
The first of Merriam-Webster’s plant-insults is my favorite:
Stink Bell: a fetid Californian herb (Fritillaria agrestis) common as a weed in grain fields
A rare plant with bell shaped flowers that is found only in California, the stink bell gets its name presumably because its blooms, well, they stink.
Cattle grazing has resumed at Contra Loma, with about a dozen cows wandering around on the northwest side of the park. According to park supervisor Janet Gomes, the grazing is used as a vegetation management technique to help propagate stinkbell, a low-growing native California plant.
— Ned Mackay, Contra Costa Times, 15 Dec. 2004
Fleabane: any of various composite plants that were once believed to drive away fleas
If you have pets, fleas may be the bane of your existence because nobody likes a pest. And that is, perhaps, why fleabane would make an excellent insult.
The common name for this flower is formed from combining flea (the small wingless bloodsucking insect) and bane, an obsolete word meaning (per the OED) “a slayer or murderer; one who causes the death or destruction of another.” The flower is so named because it was once thought to repell fleas. (The meaning of bane that is “a source of harm or ruin” is related but came later.)
Corn Cockle: an annual hairy weed (Agrostemma githago) of the pink family with purplish-red flowers that is found in grain fields
The corn cockle is a weed, which we define as “an obnoxious growth, thing, or person” and that, in addition to its ridiculous sounding name, makes it a fantastic insult for someone you do not like. The corn of corncockle is from the plant’s presence in European corn fields. The cockle part comes ultimately from Vulgar Latin meaning “shell of a mollusk.”
Bladderwort: any of a genus (Utricularia of the family Lentibulariaceae, the bladderwort family) of chiefly aquatic plants having leaves with tiny saclike structures to trap small invertebrates
There’s no two ways about it, bladderwort is as unpleasant sounding a plant name as it is a potential insult. We define a bladder as “a membranous sac in animals that serves as the receptacle of a liquid or contains gas” and also as “a gas- or air-filled vesicle in certain algae and aquatic plants.” This second meaning is the one in the plant name. The wort in bladderwort is unrelated to the wart that refers to a viral growth on the extremities, and that is sometimes used to mean “one that suggests a wart especially in smallness, unpleasantness, or unattractiveness.” This wort is actually related to the word root, but if you want to call someone unpleasant a bladderwort, we won’t tell.
Hoary Vervain: a densely white hairy perennial herb (Verbena stricta) of central North America with showy purplish blue spicate flowers
We’re not saying you should use this term to insult someone. That’s not very nice. We’re just saying it sounds like an insult, for some reason.
Dodder: any of a genus (Cuscuta) of wiry twining vines of the morning-glory family that are highly deficient in chlorophyll, are parasitic on other plants, and have tiny scales instead of leaves
This isn’t the same word as dodder which means “to tremble or shake from weakness or age,” but the parasitic and scaley dodder is actually related to an Old High German word meaning “egg yolk” probably from its appearance when overtaking another plant, and is related to morning glories. We think as an insult, it could have multiple shades of meaning.
Cowpea: a sprawling herb (Vigna unguiculata synonym V. sinensis) of the legume family related to the bean and widely cultivated in the southern U.S. for forage, green manure, and edible seeds.
Cow is already an insult on its own (sense 3), but the pea really brings it up a notch. The “cow” in cowpea is because this plant is often grown to feed animals (such as cows). The cowpea is also called a field-pea or black-eyed pea, but the name cowpea makes a way better insult than either of those.
Screwbean: a leguminous shrub or small tree (Prosopis pubescens) of the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico having spirally twisted pods with sweet pulp
If it’s not enough that screwbean sounds like an insult all on its own, please don’t miss the fact that its scientific name is P. pubescens. The name actually comes from the fact that this shrub bears beans shaped like tightly coiled corkscrews.
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