: Re: Finding the right insults As a non-native Anglophone, it can be a bit more of a challenge to do creative writing in English. Thesauri have helped me a lot, improving sentences like "Sokka caught

@Welton431

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One place to look is an etymology site. (etymology is word origin): Here is one for "twit". It says, as a noun,

"foolish, stupid and ineffectual person," 1934, British slang, popular 1950s-60s, crossed over to U.S. with British sitcoms. It probably developed from twit (v.) in the sense of "reproach," but it may be influenced by nitwit.

If I am writing a story set in a particular time; I check that site often, using "twit" before 1934 would be anachronistic.

A less direct clue is to use the Urban Dictionary, it is crowd-sourced with basically no filters, has much less formal definitions (some of them are just jokes), but you can see from the upvotes/downvotes what people think of the definitions. The NUMBER of upvotes+downvotes is an indicator of how often the slang is used, and the RATIO is an indicator for how much people agree with the given definition.

Urban dictionary can give you a little more information about cultural usage than you will get from more formal online dictionaries.

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