"Mouthbreather"

@MarjaE has a point, I think. Even “slack-jawed” doesn’t really cut it - I’ve run across stroke survivors before.

Perhaps we should use the term “knuckle-dragging Neanderthals” instead. The downside is that it is probably a slur against the Neanderthals’ good name to make a comparison like that (Neanderthals were probably much smarter and nicer); the upside (such as it is) is that Neanderthals aren’t around to be offended. It does, however, avoid ableist and classist connotations to cut to the heart of the matter: an unwillingness and/or inability to adapt and change.

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I have no idea.

The model is Harry Shearer, playing Mark Shubb in A Mighty Wind. In the commentary, Christopher Guest explains

I just remembered the name of that beard. It’s called a Newgate Fringe, and it was supposed to emulate a rope around your neck. There was this town where they used to execute people by hanging, and the people in the town would walk around with that as kind of a joke, because it looked like a noose.

But I’m not really a connoisseur of beard styles-- just remembered it from the film. In fact, I’m not sure what is meant by “neckbeard” in everyday parlance.

People who never learned to shave properly under the jaw and around the throat, I suspect.

The classic stooped-Neanderthal image comes from the Old Man of La Chapelle, who had severe arthritis, tooth loss, and probably other issues.

Then I can sympathise with him - I’m not precisely young either. It doesn’t really affect the metaphor, though - Neanderthals didn’t adapt. They are no more.

So the ironic beard has come full circle, centuries later. Though I imagine the beard has been a tool of irony since shaving started. They grow back, after all. All it takes is a society where beardiness isn’t so serious a thing that any use of it as mere expression would have consequences elsewhere.

I never investigated any official etymology of the term, but I’m pretty sure it comes from denigrating those who are unable to conform to a more socially-acceptable nose-breathing method, or are unable to care about the social standard that breathing through one’s mouth apparently violates. My younger sister has Down syndrome, and for reasons too complicated to explain here, there was a period of time during seventh grade when I rode her bus (the “shortbus” of grade-school legend) to school. My sister and I would get on, the bus would pick up several more mentally-challenged students, drop them off with my sister at their special-education elementary school, then drop off me and the junior-high-age “mainstreamed” special-ed students at my school. Oddly (in retrospect), nobody at school ever teased me for riding the shortbus to school. Anyway, my sister has always had trouble breathing through her nose, and most of the kids on the bus were mouthbreathers as well, either because of biological necessity or because telling them to close their mouths for social propriety’s sake was a hopeless exercise in futility. Didn’t matter, of course, since they got the oxygen they needed, and there were plenty of other social proprieties that took far higher priority.

Still, the times when the term “mouthbreather” was used around me, it was generally an insult used to imply that the target was the sort of kid who rode the shortbus, couldn’t tie his shoes, usually didn’t notice the drool on his chin or the booger in his nostril, sometimes made loud and incomprehensible sounds, and was oblivious to the social niceties of polite company. It’s basically the same kind of insult as when formerly medically-specific terms as “moron” and “idiot” were used to describe people who were, to employ an oversimplification, stupid without a good reason, as opposed to people with mental handicaps beyond their ability to overcome, which would hopefully have inspired more compassion.

So it does have an ableist background, I feel certain, and its use should be avoided as completely as using “retarded” as an insult, if one does not wish to inadvertently give offense.

I have uncommonly capacious sinuses, and boy you wouldn’t believe the volume of nastiness I can blow outta my nose on my snottier days. As a kid, sometimes it was easier for me to breathe through my mouth, so it became a frequent unconscious habit which my mother often tried to get me to break. To this day I try to remember to breathe through the nose when I’m able, and I’m always terribly self-conscious about possible halitosis, and I honestly have no idea whether nose-breathing or mouth-breathing is healthier (if all things be equal and the boogers don’t obstruct), but I know my own self-consciousness about it, when it occurs to me, is based on an underlying fear of appearing to be someone who is either ignorant of the public’s prejudice against mouth-breathing, or simply doesn’t care enough to meet the social standard.

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In the Southern US when I was young we seemed to equate mouthbreather to unskilled labour, jocks & others who actually were mouth-breating often when engaged in whatever they do. In this way it implied low intellect among people with intellects themselves low enough to generalize about large diverse groups of people.

but it would not have been used to refer to someone of low physicality even if they were also considered low intellect.

I think physicality is a definitive facet of the word.

I don’t know, but I think the face with the Balbo is Jimmy Hill.

Chinny reckon?

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