Best insult ever. I heard this one when I was around about ten years old and it’s stuck with me ever since. When I was a kid, my family were friends with another family who had 4 kids. They were very different to us and I was always noticing things, making mental comparisons. Their house was so much cleaner. We used to call fastidious neatness “ducky”.

“Their house is so ducky”

What the hell does that mean? Every night the Mum would set the breakfast table for the next morning. I have to admit, I thought that was a nice touch. The tablecloth looked so bright and cheerful, all the bowls in place as stand-ins for their human counterparts. They had an in-ground pool. Upstairs was an enormous red-carpeted rumpus room.

One day I was visiting and the two sisters were doing something in the kitchen. Pouring cordial? They were squabbling and jostling. Then the older one said to the younger one:

“Shut your face or I’ll eat it”

This stands out as the first time I ever started noticing things that people said and filing them away as word-combination-gold. I do it all the time now. I like to catch words that would otherwise disappear into the ether. I repeat them, write them down, replay them in my head.

Some favourites:

Don’t do it, Tracksuit

Round-of-a-Crazy-Plause

Stop farting and breakdance

Thank you to all the brilliant people in my life who say funny shit. As an aside, after first hearing of the Miami Zombie case (which is still possibly the most horrible thing I have ever heard of), I couldn’t help but think of “Shut your face or I’ll eat it”.