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  All of these ingenious expressions can be found within The Art of Verbal Warfare, Rik Smits's book about the language of power and aggression. This is a broad field, which explains why it runs to more than 500 pages. Yet it's a spicy and entertaining read throughout, from popular slang to political mud-slinging, to an invaluable chapter on the Fifteen Rules of Propaganda. Not forgetting the disaster of social media . . . there is such a fountain of anarchic, foul-mouthed, carnivalesque energy, obscenity and linguistic mayhem on display here, so much of it hilariously enjoyable, that life would be a dull affair without it. Would you really want to live in a world where irritable Danes were prevented from calling each other "arse-banana"?

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  Sunday Times

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  Smits’s main strength lies in finding the most pungent illustrations of the phenomena he describes . . . In examining how we swear to defend our turf or encroach on other people’s, he draws on his own experience, as well as reproducing nuggets of salty invective from the football terraces or the verbal duels performed by Yoruba women. It’s an eye-opening ride . . . [Smits'] energy and enthusiasm make him an engaging guide.

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  Times Literary Supplement

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  Whether in hieroglyphic, written word or shouted profanity, humans have historically enjoyed a rich reservoir of language reserved for abuse, insult, threat, the expression of frustration and the many other situations which call for the more colourful phraseology. This brick of a book looks at those vocabularies and how they are employed across different cultures and in a multitude of scenarios, from children striving to shock to the advertising industry seeking attention in order to shift product.

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  Strong Words Magazine

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  A funny and fascinating exploration of our reliance upon swear words, insults, and the artfully placed expletive, damn it. Smits delves into the magic of oaths and profanity, art and advertising, the lure of fake news and propaganda, as well as invective and off-color jokes the world over.

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  The Next Big Idea Club

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  If you want to know why you swear, what counts as a potty mouth in other cultures, and why words can hurt more than sticks and stones, then this rampage of a book is for you: it will amuse, embarrass, provoke, enlighten and annoy the hell out of you about all forms of dirty language – and dirty politics. For it is also a passionate defence of the joys and failures Western democracy, liberalism and rationality – for which using words well really matters.

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  Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek, University of Cambridge, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy

Rik Smits is a linguist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His books include The Puzzle of Left-handedness (Reaktion, 2011) and Dawn: The Origins of Language and the Modern Human Mind (2016).