Tidbits: Bald Cruelty in Literature

Our language is full of colorful derogatory comments that use bald people as targets without realizing just how sensitive balding men are. Here are a few balding comments:

• Bald as a bean, an egg, a melon, a baby’s ass

Great literature occasionally had unkind references about balding:

• You bald-pated, lying rascal (‘Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare)
• Whoreson smooth-pates (‘Henry IV’, Shakespeare)
• A Pitiful bald crown (‘Henry IV’, Shakespeare)
• You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot (‘Old Pictures in Florence’, Robert Browning)
• The jealous, the jealous old Baldpate (John Keats)

Pate is a chiefly disparaging term used negatively about the crown or brain. I would guess that in olden days, people struck out against dimwitted behavior with this term, much like a “knuckle-head” might be used today.