Within the space of a few weeks, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, an Iranian vice president, opined that the British were "inhuman" idiots saddled with a dunce of a prime minister, and the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, scoffed that the Americans should "pour water where it burns", a vulgar Iranian expression that refers to people who are so angry that their buttocks catch fire.
A hardline Iranian newspaper joined the fray by branding Carla Bruni, France's first lady, a "prostitute". It is nothing new for the Iranian regime to lambast the West in robust terms. But these various diatribes raised eyebrows at home and abroad because crudity rarely features in Iran's political discourse. Analysts say that while Mr Ahmadinejad's earthy rhetoric against the West upsets educated Iranians and reformists, it is a populist attempt to appeal to his working-class supporters as a man of the people possessing a common touch.
"The language used by Ahmadinejad may not be deemed proper for the president of a country, but it brings him closer to his base, who find him affable and to be one of them," said Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the University of Hawaii. Mr Ahmadinejad's invective against the United States is also an attempt to deflect attention from bitter political in-fighting between Iran's conservatives and does not mean he is slamming the door on nuclear talks, other analysts say.
"Despite his tough language against Washington, Ahmadinejad is on the record as supporting unconditional talks with the five-plus-one powers on the nuclear issue," Scott Lucas, an Iran specialist at Birmingham University in England, said in an interview. The P5+1 is shorthand for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France - plus Germany.
The vicious slur against Ms Bruni, the wife of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, came last week in Kayhan, an influential ultra-hardline daily close to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who appointed its managing editor. Kayhan targeted the "infamous" Ms Bruni after she penned a passionate open letter of support to Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the 43-year-old Iranian mother of two sentenced to death by stoning for alleged adultery.
"In the depths of your cell, know that my husband will plead your cause unfailingly and that France will not abandon you," Ms Bruni wrote. Under the headline "French Prostitutes Also Entered the Human Rights Cry", a Kayhan editorial attempted to delegitimize Ms Bruni's solidarity with Ashtiani by portraying the French president's wife as a fallen woman. "Bruni managed to break up Sarkozy's marriage and become France's first lady, yet recently there's been news about her having an affair with a singer," it said.
Ms Bruni and her husband have rejected the claims as untrue. The scurrilous attack on Ms Bruni was not surprising. The daily rarely minces its words and routinely questions the morality of leading Iranian women's rights activists. "But ? going after the spouse of a sitting president in this way is a new low," Ms Farhi said in an interview. Domestically, Mr Ahmadinejad's undiplomatic language has attracted more attention than Kayhan's insults. In the same speech to visiting Iranian expatriates this month in which Mr Ahmadinejad advised Americans to douse their burning bottoms, he used another phrase to describe the futility of US threats against Iran.
"The bogeyman has snatched the boob," he said to the obvious amusement of his audience. The expression is used by Iranian mothers when they are weaning their infants off breast milk. "Mameh", which is slang for breast in Persian, is rarely uttered in public, where "words and expressions of even the slightest sexual nature are considered taboo and commonly censored in books and publications", wrote Golnaz Esfandiari, an Iran specialist at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
She noted that Mr Ahmadinejad's "coarse language" had often been crticised by Iranian reformists and intellectuals "who are more apt to pepper their language with passages from poets such as Ferdowsi, Saadi, Hafez and Khayyam". But prominent conservatives have also expressed their distaste. Iran's judiciary chief, Sadegh Larijani, a rival of the president, publicly upbraided Mr Ahmadinejad recently. "As a citizen of this country, I expect the language and rhetoric the president employs in his speech to be impressive, well-founded and fair," Mr Larijani said.
Crossing linguistic red lines has not come without a cost. Mr Ahmadinejad's first vice president, Mr Rahimi, publicly backtracked after his denunciation of the British as a nation of inhuman "thick people" ruled by a dunce for prime minister. His remarks, delivered in a speech on August 9 to senior Iranian education officials, drew a rare public rebuke from Britain. And an article in the reformist daily, Tehran Emruz, highlighted the irony of Mr Rahimi telling his audience to teach students manners to avoid raising "a bunch of people who utter abuse".
Within days, Mr Rahimi's office issued a statement that effectively said he only meant to insult some British politicians. "There is no doubt that respect for nations of the world is the Islamic republic of Iran's political strategy." The statement was not an apology and offered no retraction of Mr Rahimi's view that David Cameron is "stupid". But it represented a rare public step back by an Iranian hardliner. He had either realised he had gone too far or was reprimanded by other senior regime officials, analysts said.
One observer in Tehran, who did not want to be named, said: "Anglophobia is deeply rooted among ordinary Iranians, but the Iranians are a cultured people and they were embarrassed by Rahimi's abusive language." @Email:mtheodoulou@thenational.ae