The suffix -lover is frequently used to produce pejorative epithets, but it has a dubiously hit-and-miss track record. It can, sometimes, be an effective insult-building suffix, but it also sometimes backfires spectacularly in a way that more reliable alternatives (-ass, -bag, -beast, -blossom, -head, -hole, -pants, -pie, -sack, -wad, -wagon, -weed, etc.) do not. So caution is advised.
The main difficulty of using -lover to transform a word into an insult is, of course, that it winds up accusing someone of a virtue. And not just any virtue, but the cardinal virtue, the highest virtue of all — the most excellent way, the greatest of these, etc.
And it does so sincerely. This accusation of virtue is genuine. Contrast this with, for example, the pejorative use of smart as a prefix in insult-building (smart-aleck, smart-ass, smartypants) or the related use of wise- (-acre, -apple, -ass, etc.). Intelligence and wisdom are also virtues, but epithets constructed with smart- and wise- aren’t attributing those virtues to the target, but rather suggesting their absence. They do not imply that the target has a surplus of intelligence or wisdom, but, rather, they sarcastically highlight the target’s lack of such virtues. Implicit in most uses of smart- or wise- is an unspoken “You think you’re so smart” — which is, of course, very different from saying, simply, “you’re so smart.”
The pejorative suffix -lover doesn’t do that. It doesn’t question the presence of the virtue of love in its target, but sincerely asserts that this person possesses that virtue in abundance. It does not imply an unspoken “You think you’re so loving,” but simply and straightforwardly accuses them of being loving.
And again, that’s a tricky thing, basing an insult on an accusation of the greatest good. This is why, for example, we don’t find in our folklore any significant body of Your Mama jokes that begin “Your Mama is so loving that …”
But we do find something similar to that in the annals of Your Mama lore. We can find hundreds of Your Mama jokes that accuse the eponymous matron of a kind of disproportionate surfeit of love. We have thousands of such jokes describing Your Mama of having an inordinate love of food or of money or of the pleasures of the flesh. Those insults tend to be effective as insults. They don’t backfire on the accuser, recoiling into reluctant admiration or spiteful jealousy the way the use of the suffix -lover so often does. And they help point to why that suffix is so dangerous and why it often misfires so completely.
The key to the effective use of -lover as a pejorative insult-building suffix comes down to this basic principle: Love people; use things.
That’s an important principle more generally. It also works as a shorthand reminder of the meaning of life or the secret to happiness, etc., if you’re into that kind of thing, and I don’t want to suggest that it’s primarily useful for helping us avoid an unintentional ambiguity in our insults. But since that is our subject here, let’s talk about how it does that.
This is what separates the effective use of -lover as a pejorative suffix from its disastrously ineffectual use. If we employ this suffix to accuse another of being a [thing]-lover, our insult may find its mark. But if we employ the suffix to accuse another of being a [people]-lover, it will almost always come back to bite us and we’ll wind up slurring only ourselves while ladling praise on those we meant to discredit.
I learned this from, of all people, Ed Dobson.
Dobson was an executive at the Moral Majority where he worked for years as Jerry Falwell’s right-hand man, a vice president at Liberty University, and an associate pastor at Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church. Dobson left that religious right powerhouse to become the pastor of a Reformed megachurch in Grand Rapids. That’s where he was when the AIDS epidemic began. Heart-broken and unsure how to respond, Dobson turned to an area chapter of Act Up and asked what he could do to help.
As you can imagine, that didn’t go over well with some factions in his large conservative church, where some began calling for his head. They held protests, where one angry person held a sign saying “Ed Dobson loves homosexuals.” He responded by saying that he hoped that was true. He said that was what he was trying to do to the best of his ability, and that if, when he died, the words “Ed Dobson loved homosexuals” were written on his tombstone then he would know that he had lived a worthy life.
It’s never an insult to be accused of being a people-lover. Loving people is, after all, the whole point. It’s what all of us are supposed to be doing — the greatest obligation, necessity and privilege we all enjoy. So when we attempt to employ the pejorative suffix -lover to a root word referring to people or groups of people, the insult we’re building will inevitably backfire.
Love people; use things. An effective insult cannot accuse someone of getting that right.
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