"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries," said the taunting French soldier to Sir Galahad in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Insults that profound were never hurled by Paul Siakaluk while he was conducting his study to determine the effects of insulting words on people. When pouring derision on his test subjects, the UNBC psychology professor kept his words short and simple.
What did become apparent to Siakaluk was that insults which contain references to body parts, such as numbskull, butthead or motormouth, had more impact on listeners than insults without bodily ties, such as moron, idiot, or buffoon.
How did he prove that? By measuring reaction times.
Study participants were asked to write down as many insults as they could, refraining from using racist or derogatory terms, and that produced a list of more than 800 words and phrases. Siakaluk divided the words into three categories -- insults with bodily references, insults without bodily references and non-insulting words. The words were then flashed in rapid succession on a computer screen and people were instructed to ignore the meaning of the words and just say the colour of the font that made up each word as soon they saw it.
In three experiments that involved UNBC students Holly-Anne Darymple and Jody Stearns and close to 200 participants, carried out at the University of Calgary with psychology professor Penny Pexman, words that contained body references were found to be more difficult for test subjects to ignore.
"People were slower to name aloud the font colour of the embodied insults than the non-embodied insults, which suggests there was a little more information in them that was grabbing their attention and it took them longer to respond," said Siakaluk.
"Some insults just require a little more processing. It's easy to understand how we can physically or perceptually interact with things when you can see them, smell them, touch them or move them. But it's a little bit harder to investigate how that bodily knowledge might influence abstract thinking.
"We used insults because a lot of them are abstracted away from the literal meaning of what their component parts are. If somebody calls you a numbskull, they're not saying you have a numb skull, but they're implying your intellect isn't working properly right now."
The colour-based experiment, also known as a Stroop test, has been used to prove the negative effects of dental terms on people who have a fear of going to a dentist. When test subjects read words like root canal, drill and fillings in colored fonts it took them longer to utter the font colour of those words than it did for people who do not have dental anxieties.
"The reason for that is those words have more meaningful to them and it's more of an emotional experience for them when they read the word and they have a harder time saying the font colour," said Siakaluk.
"The instructions are always, ignore the word and just say the font colour, but people can't ignore the word because reading for educated people is such an automatic thing. The knowledge you have while you're interacting with things, seeing and touching them, is also going to be the knowledge you have about them when they're not present and you're just thinking about them."
The insult study took about 18 months to complete. Siakaluk said he couldn't think of any practical uses for his findings.
"Nothing really took me by surprise, I got the results I was hoping for," said Siakaluk .
