prick, you

   ‘Prick’ has been a slang word for the penis since the sixteenth century. The word is not in polite use, and this expression is as vulgar as the American ‘you shmuck’. As with that Yiddish term, ‘you prick’ does not make specific reference to the penis, it simply indicates feelings of detestation on the part of the speaker.

   In Portnoy’s Complaint, by Philip Roth, the hero berates himself as ‘you little prick’ as he considers the unhappiness he has caused his father. He is later called ‘you cold-hearted prick’ by one of his girl-friends. The same girl makes a more specific reference to his penis when she calls him ‘you mean, miserable hardon, you’.

   In Moviola, by Garson Kanin, a woman calls a man ‘you fat, four-eyed, no good, lying, filthy prick’. ‘Four-eyed’ is a reference to his wearing of spectacles. ‘Stupid prick’ is an insult hurled at one man by another in Mordecai Richler’s St Urbain’s Horseman, the speaker being Jewish.

   The latter point may be relevant, since both ‘putz’ and ‘shmuck’ are commonly used Yiddish insults, both of which could be translated by ‘prick’. ‘It’s easy for you to joke about it, you prick,’ says one man to another in Blue Dreams, by William Hanley, but we are told that he says it ‘fondly’, showing the common conversion of an insult into a friendly term of address.