WAR OF THE WORDS : In the Battle of Insults, Our Sexist Language Prevents Fighting Fair

Number Two on the list of reasons I’m glad the presidential campaign is over: They were running out of insults!

With candidates scraping the bottom for bozo, ozone man, prince of sleaze, monster and chicken man , you just knew that if it had gone on any longer, we would have been blasted with sound bites about that “tax-and-spend doo-doo head” and his opponents, “ol’ boogerbrains” and “little big mouth.”

And two of these guys went to Yale.

But it’s not altogether their doing. Our withered national vocabulary hasn’t left candidates with much in the way of lofty language to fling around. Most words of opprobrium sound as if they were ground out by a script-o-matic for TV shows about teen-agers with a stupefying excess of free time and inherited money: dweeb, weenie, wonk, dork, jerk. (Is it the letter K that makes a word sound silly? If so, then how come the Ku Klux Klan hasn’t been laughed out of town?)

So what’s a politician to do? Coot and curmudgeon are fossilized, as is egghead , the insult they threw at Adlai Stevenson. Redneck is a fightin’ word. Mugwump and mossback are too obscure, and to some people, troglodyte sounds vaguely flattering, like a four-wheel-drive vehicle. As for adjectives, geeky is too adolescent, craven is too hoity-toity, we know why bush didn’t get used this time out, and macho, God help us, is still a compliment in some quarters.

Ah, but there are plenty of insults for women. If you didn’t hear them used during this “Year of the Woman,” it’s because hardly any of them have anything to do with insufficient brains or ability. They are words about age and sexuality, obliging or disobliging:

For adolescence, there’s hoyden, flirt, hussy, jailbait, minx, kitten or Lolita.

For womanhood, we’ve got gold digger, trollop, vamp, slut, Jezebel, tart, bawd, slattern, vixen, floozy, drab, jade, shrew, wench, broad, scold, frail, skirt, Amazon or the unforgettable bimbo.

For old age, choose crone, harpy, hag, harridan or spinster.

And those are just the nouns.

Right before the Democratic convention, I interviewed Hillary Clinton, and we practically recited in unison the he-she, male-female adjectives: A man is confident, but a woman is arrogant. A man is assertive, but a woman is aggressive. A man is forceful, but a woman is pushy. . . .

Last spring, in the oldest slam in the dictionary, a woman running for the Senate in Kansas was called a “bull dyke” by a fringe candidate’s followers. Was she competent? Honest? Who knows? Call her a lesbian, and the rest becomes irrelevant.

Last summer, a troglodytic congressman from Orange County reviled as “lesbian spear-chuckers” the women who backed his primary opponent, a woman. This fall, one of California’s Democratic Senate candidates was written off as a check-bouncing, pay-raising “aging cheerleader”--and by another woman. The day Dianne Feinstein was sworn in as a U.S. senator, the National Organization for Women here got phone calls involving death and women’s genitalia, directed at “you bunch of f - - -ing bitches” who “should know your place.”

You can’t even construct a parallel vocabulary for men. Aging yell leader? And isn’t there a card game called Old Maid? Old Man just doesn’t carry the same scornful pity. Even Dan Quayle got gigged for his brains, not his hair: The sign in the crowd said, “It’s the economy, stupid,” not “It’s the economy, blondie.”

This is the first of many years of many women, so how will candidates, women and men, conduct tough campaigns with such flawed language?

They’ll fight fair. They’ll unsex it, as Lady Macbeth would have it. The language door must swing both ways. Politics needs smart language--even smart insults--and the candidates to match. I’m sure the confident/arrogant, assertive/aggressive, forceful/pushy new First Lady would agree.

Oh, the Number One reason I’m glad the election is over? Getting that Millie out of the White House. She was such a bitch.