I find it amusing, but a bit wrong, how a lot of words that are used as insults are just people's surnames, especially in Ireland. Bad enough that there are unfortunate names without people actively making others offensive.

Langer, Minger, Skobie... Moron/Moran sounds a bit suspicious but I think moron started as a technical academic word before going through the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill

Then there's poor old Pedro Damiano...

Is there also a 'Stonewall' in cricket? Then it must be related to the War of the Roses!! 

I'm probably not the only German who knows virtually nothing about the VIPs in the US Civil War 

The defensive qualities of stone walls are known since millenia, so I wonder if one can trace back the word's use in chess to a particular event!?

Best regards,

Zwischenzugzwang

I think I heard nimrod used as an insult first on Happy Days. (What a nimrod!) It was a common insult thrown about by Mork (Robin Williams' break-out role, which became the title character of Mork and Mindy). 

BUT, this is from memory. I haven't been able to find supporting evidence online yet. The urban dictionary traces the insult to Elmer Fudd. Who's to argue with the urban dictionary?

Nimrod was the code name of a fictional British spy in the comedy, Hogan's Heroes. It was actually a bit of subterfuge to make Colonel Klink (the German head of the POW camp) appear to be an idiot. 

But both the Bugs Bunny and the Hogan's Heroes references seem rather meager resources for altering the meaning of the word.

Anyone here who knows the origin of "Stonewall" or "stonewalling"?

I've gathered that it's not just a chess opening and American civil war general, but also a term in cricket for defensive play - but which of these came first?

And btw, regarding the chess opening - is that name universal or does this set-up have a different name somewhere? It's highly unusual that the English name would catch on without even getting officially translated into Steinmauer or similar, but [i]Stonewall [/i]seems to be the accepted name everywhere...?!

Last time I mentioned this here a few years ago, Bonsai pointed out to me that the opening was played by Saint Amant already in the 1830s and 40s, so if anyone has access to chess literature from around then - did the opening have a different name before 1860, or was it simply the Dutch mainline?

My guess would be that it's originally a cricket term, but Stonewall Jackson brought it into common use.

At least the spike in Google's word database over millions of scanned books from 1800-2000 seem to indicate that, 
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=to+stonewall%2CStonewall&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
though the spike seems to be just before 1860, so was Jackson known as Stonewall even before the Civil War?

The other day I watched an Cheers rerun and came across the word "nimrod" as in "we're just a bunch of nimrods" - a little googling revealed an interesting history, Nimrod is known from the bible, among other things as a great hunter and the founder of Babylon.

But nowadays, [i]nimrod [/i]is apparently synonymous with idiot. How that happened can be seen here: [url]http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nimrod[/url]. Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

I'm looking forward to see others' examples of interesting word-histories they've encountered. :)