Has anyone ever tried to insult you by claiming that they had sexual relations with your mother? On the face of it, it is just another one of those not particularly clever insults that gets bandied about when a witty retort can’t be found. But when you think about it, it is actually quite a confused little sentiment.

As near as I can tell, t here are only 3 ways it can be interpreted.

1) It implies that your mother had sex, as if that is somehow an insult. I’m not sure exactly how that works though…apart from one isolated case, it is a good bet that almost everyone’s biological mother has had sex at least once.

2) Your mother is sexually attractive. Whoa, that’s such a deep insult. It’s not like society sees any merit in being sexually attractive. And hey, she’s your genetic antecedent – so some of her sexual attractiveness has passed on to you. This is more like a compliment than an insult.

3) The insulter is so horribly repugnant that the very idea that your mother slept with him is a slur on her good taste. How that is an insult to you is unclear; maybe the assumption is that no matter how far she’s fallen, she will still have higher standards about with whom she gets jiggy.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on one of the more perplexing aspects of modern culture.

P.S., yes typography geeks, that is totally an interrobang.