In 1863, the “Lady’s Newspaper” of London printed a letter that’s gone down in the annals of insulting texts as a classic. It was from somebody called “J. Hooker”, and although it’s not really known who that might have been, there’s some speculation that it was Joseph Dalton Hooker. He was a well-known biologist of that time, and was known to have a large vocabulary and to utilize it in just this manner.
The letter had to do with the servants in rural France, whom the writer had evidently had some unpleasant experiences with. The best line of the letter goes like this:
“If I were to do more than hint at their hydrophobic habits, their pulicidal, pulicivorous, and even phtheirophagous propensities, I should call down, not undeservedly, the Zoilism of our correspondents.”
“Hydrophobic”, although rare, is the most common of all the significant terms in this diatribe; it means aversion to water, and figuratively implies that the people the writer is talking about don’t wash very often.
“Pulicidal” is an obscure word, and its meaning is pretty odd as well; it comes from the English “pulex”, which means flea, and “-cidal”, which means destructive of. It works pretty well with the alliteration that sentence’s long sequence of “p” words, but if you think about it, being someone who kills fleas is not clearly a bad thing.
Next comes “puliciverous”, which is pretty similar. Its beginning is also derived from “pulex”, so it’s about fleas as well, but “-civorous” has to do with eating, as in “omnivorous”. So far our correspondent might be accusing rural French servants of killing and eating fleas. Frowned upon in England, I’m sure, but hey, in France they even eat snails.
On to “phtheirophagous”. Here again we have a compound word derived from Latin roots, and this one means “eating lice”. This one might have a figurative meaning when used as an insult, because primate grooming rituals — among chimpanzees, for example — involve picking out lice and eating them. Once again, not an English practice, but once you get past the snails, maybe anything goes.
The next obscure word is “Zoilism”, and it’s capitalized. That’s because it refers to a Greek writer from about 400 BCE, Zoilus. He’s known for being an extreme critic of Homer, Plato, and Socrates, and has been used to mean anyone who routinely offers up harsh criticism. It was moderately common from the 1600s through the 1800s, but by now has pretty much disappeared. Not that harsh criticism has abated in recent times; the word’s demise has more to do with subjects removed from elementary education curricula (an educated population being less malleable).
So there you have it; J. Hooker, in 1863, thought the servants available in rural areas of France were dirty and ate bugs, and he could have gone in to a lot more detail but he didn’t want to be accused of being a habitual complainer. If “J. Hooker” really was Joseph Dalton Hooker, he needn’t have worried about being known for complaints; he was Charles Darwin’s closest friend and colleague, travelled the world extensively (including the Himalayas and Antarctica) collecting botanical specimens, was a Fellow of the Royal Society, President of the Royals Society, received numerous other honors and awards, and at least 30 plants and 2 species of animals are named after him. Including, not ironically at all, the land snail “Notodiscus hookeri“, which is not the variety used in French escargot — but only because they live on Antarctic islands, absent the pestering presence of pulicidal, pulicivorous, and phtheirophagous pigeons.
