toad

   The toad has been considered rather loathsome since at least the sixteenth century. Modern children might still call an unpleasant person ‘old toad’, but they would probably ensure that they were out of range of that person’s hands before doing so.

   A Trick to Catch the Old One, by Thomas Middleton, has a slanging match which begins: ‘Toad!’ ‘Aspic!’ ‘Serpent!’ ‘Viper!’

   Shakespeare uses the vocative in Richard the Third (4:iv), where the Duchess of York says to Richard: ‘Thou toad, thou toad, where is thy brother Clarence?’ In Timon of Athens (4:iii),

   Apemantus and Timon insult each other at length, and it is Apemantus who finally resorts to Toad!’ He is answered with ‘Rogue, rogue, rogue’. As You Like It (2:i) has a passing reference to the ‘ugly and venemous’ toad; that phrase sums up what a speaker has in mind when he uses this insulting vocative.

   As a footnote, Kenneth Grahame, in The Wind in the Willows, says that the term of address which most offends Toad of Toad Hall is ‘my good woman’, addressed to him when he is disguised as a washerwoman.