Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Contention, noisy argument.
  • noun Scolding, rebuke.
  • noun A poetic contest of insults or invective.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From flyte.

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Examples

  • The poem contains more than one "flyting" -- to use the Scottish term -- and the high war of words between Satan and Abdiel in heaven, or between Satan and Gabriel on earth, could not have been handled save by a master of all the weapons of verbal fence and all the devices of wounding invective.

    Milton Walter Alexander Raleigh 1891

  • He cites lines from the "flyting" scene that contain examples of this metaphor and then argues that the poet is criticizing Unferth in the way he refers to the contents of Unferth's mind.

    Archive 2008-01-01 Prof. de Breeze 2008

  • He cites lines from the "flyting" scene that contain examples of this metaphor and then argues that the poet is criticizing Unferth in the way he refers to the contents of Unferth's mind.

    The Alien Culture of Beowulf Prof. de Breeze 2008

  • Bussy's invectives against courtly practices (I, i, 84-104) and hypocrisy in high places (III, ii, 25-59), while the "flyting" between him and Monsieur is perhaps the choicest specimen of Elizabethan

    Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois George Chapman

  • His epigrams (most of which are contained in _The Scourge of Folly_, undated, like others of his books) are by no means despicable; the Welsh ancestors, whom he did not fail to commemorate, seem to have endowed him with some of that faculty for lampooning and "flyting" which distinguished the Celtic race.

    A History of Elizabethan Literature George Saintsbury 1889

  • Drinking sets in seriously after dark, and is known by the violent merriment of the men, and the no less violent quarrelling and "flyting" of the sex which delights in the "harmony of tongues."

    Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 Richard Francis Burton 1855

  • Professor Ferenc Szasz argued that so-called rap battles, where two or more performers trade elaborate insults, derive from the ancient Caledonian art of "flyting".

    Blackinformant.com - African-American culture, news commentary, politics 2009

  • 'flyting' the great hulking lout for his awkwardness, and threatening to

    The Red True Story Book Andrew Lang 1900

  • Update: Paul sez, "Old Norse and Old English poetry (written down in the 13th and 8th-11th centuries respectively, but often of earlier oral origins) know the tradition of" flyting, "insulting speech esp. before battle.

    Boing Boing: January 29, 2006 - February 4, 2006 Archives 2006

  • He would have done better to look up some Early Scots examples of flyting insult exchanges or taken some lines from Shakespeare.

    On insulting Brits DC 2010

Comments

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  • A dispute or exchange of personal abuse in verse form.

    May 12, 2008

  • Not as Jamaican as they Sound

    June 25, 2009

  • More specifically, a slanging match in verse form where two poets insult each other alternately in profanely abusive verses. Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie is the pinnacle of this rich Scottish tradition.

    Dunbar has the curious distinction of having been responsible for the first printed use of the word "fuck": (his 1503 poem "Brash of Wowing" Collected Poems, ed. Mackenzie, cf. 'In secret place this hyndir nycht' includes the lines: "Yit be his feirris he wald haif fukkit:/ Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane.") He thus established a long and noble tradition. The "powerful word" which Dunbar put into print in 1508 was not decriminalised until 1960.

    His poem The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie also contains the term cuntbittin (meaning afflicted with venereal disease), the first known use of the word cunt in literature (although Chaucer used queynte as a euphemism for the word in the Canterbury Tales). The Flyting also contains the line (addressed by Kennedy to Dunbar) "Wan-fukkit funling, that natour maid ane yrle" (the phrase "wan-fukkit" might perhaps be rendered as 'unfortunately conceived', or 'ineptly conceived', in Modern English - Kennedy is accusing Dunbar of being a foundling and a dwarf).

    Source: Wikipedia.

    September 19, 2009