When I was a kid, if you wanted to call someone stupid and had run through the greatest hits already (stupid, moron, retard, idiot, dumb, dimwit, brainless, dim bulb, dumbass, birdbrain) you might ultimately land on nimrod. We had no idea we were calling him this guy.
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| Real Nimrod |
Poor Nimrod. We don't know too much about him, but in the Book of Genesis (chapter 10), we learn the reputation for which he was remembered for thousands of years:
8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
9 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.
10 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.
Thus Nimrod was a mighty hunter, a king and the founder of great cities. 1 Chronicles 1:10 reiterates his fame, and Micah 5:6 refers to the long-gone king's area as "the land of Nimrod."
He was probably as famous as Orion the Hunter was in Greek mythology. Orion got in a lot of trouble, but wound up as a constellation, so he had that going for him. You wouldn't imagine someone saying "You're such an Orion!"
The name Nimrod was even more cemented in the public consciousness than Orion's, back when we were a Bible-studying culture. H. D. Rawnsley's 1903 reminiscences, Lake Country Sketches, mentions Sir John Crozier, who owned a fox-hunting lodge in that bucolic English area. Crozier is remembered as "a North Country Nimrod."
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| The North Country Nimrod in question |
Hobart Caunter's book Legendary & Romantic Tales of Indian History (1885) has a chapter called "The Mahomedan Nimrod," concerning "Mujahid, the son of Mahomed Shah, sovereign of the Deccan," who "was remarkable for his courage and amazing strength of body." Not someone to call a Nimrod, if the name was insulting.
And let us not forget that Ernest Shackleton, a great explorer of the frozen wastes, sailed a mighty whaler named Nimrod on his 1908 expedition to Antarctica -- one of many intrepid vessels by that name.
So what happened so unjustly to Nimrod? You probably know. As Ken Zurski noted on the site Unremembered History, in the 1940 Looney Tune cartoon "A Wild Hare," "a wise-cracking rabbit named Bugs Bunny called his nemesis Elmer Fudd a 'poor little nimrod,' a sarcastic reference to Fudd’s skills as a hunter." In fact (and was disputed online quite a bit), the line does not appear in that cartoon. It was not Bugs that called Elmer "my little Nimrod" -- that heap of irony apparently came first from Daffy Duck, in the 1948 short "What Makes Daffy Duck."
Neither I nor any other kid knew who Nimrod was -- even kids from churchgoing families might be expected to miss a name so briefly mentioned in the Bible -- and Daffy's snottiness seals the deal. The phonemes of NIMrod trip easily off the tongue with disdain, so a kid who didn't know better would just take it as an insult. Plus, it rhymes with dimwad, which sounds very much like a euphemism for dickhead.
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| Fake Nimrod |
In much the same way as irony turned "Entrance of the Gladiators" from a thrilling scene -- mighty warriors prepared to face dismemberment and death in battle -- into clown music, so did the ironic use of the name Nimrod in a Warner Brothers' cartoon turn the mighty hunter into a clown himself.
