best British insults

‘Don’t throw your toys out the pram’ is one of my favourite British insults. Calling an adult a baby having a temper tantrum is so condescending, and hearing one adult say it to another is very funny to me. It doesn’t need a swear word to do the job.

When I shared my favourites in August 2021, I’d been living in South-East England for five years. These were words and phrases I’d actually heard in day-to-day life. I loved the variety, including the insults that were only a word or two and the comparisons people could keep adapting.

A muppet, a wally and a daft cow

A lot of the individual words on my list did similar work. Depending on the example, they were calling someone stupid, annoying or obnoxious, and I wasn’t trying to give each one an exact definition. There were plenty to choose from, including plonker, numpty, spanner, pillock and prat.

Muppet was a personal favourite. My example was ‘Get out of the way, you muppet’, which puts it into the sort of annoyed sentence where I’d heard these words used. My example for wally was ‘You spilled your drink all over me, you wally’.

I also loved ‘daft cow’, and I made myself the subject of that one by imagining somebody commenting on my videos. These examples came with my terrible attempt at a British accent. I felt as though I couldn’t say them without slipping into a stereotypical version of one, and I apologised for it in advance.

On your bike

‘On your bike’ was one of the phrases I particularly liked. It tells someone to go away, but I also described using it as a response to something outrageous. Somebody says something ridiculous and you reject it outright, as though you’re telling them to get on their bike and leave with that idea.

‘Lost the plot’ was another favourite, for somebody who didn’t seem to know what was going on or was behaving ridiculously. In the examples I gave, it could be a reaction to somebody being outrageous. The words themselves already suggest that they’ve stopped following what’s happening.

An adult throwing toys out of a pram

The pram insult was incredibly condescending. A pram is what I’d call a stroller back in North America, and the person throwing toys out of it is an infant having a tantrum. Apply that picture to a grown adult and you’ve got an incredibly demeaning way to describe their behaviour.

You can tell somebody not to throw their toys out the pram, or say that somebody else has been doing it. I loved hearing that phrase. ‘Billy no mates’ was a different kind of brutal, because it simply meant that somebody had no friends. I found that one absolutely devastating.

As useful as a chocolate teapot

Then there was the format that let people invent their own comparisons. ‘As useful as a chocolate teapot’ and ‘as helpful as a concrete life preserver’ were two of my examples. The comparison describes something that would be terrible at its intended job, and applies that uselessness to the person being insulted.

I also mentioned ‘as much use as wet kitchen roll’ and ‘you couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag’. They’re ways of making the same sort of insulting comparison, with plenty of room to change the words. Some versions could get inappropriate very quickly, so I was trying to stick to the more PG examples there.

That adaptable format wasn’t something I really recognised from Canada, and I found it interesting. After five years in one part of England, I still wanted to hear the words people used elsewhere. A favourite insult from somebody up north or in Scotland could add something completely different to my list.

Watch my original British-insults examples.