Insults: the literate side to the English teenager.

One will have heard about the criticism of the sacrilege of the English language by teenagers today ad nauseam- with texting reducing what was once a poetic, complex and beautiful language into a salmagundi of abbreviations, emoticons, and misplaced numbers by the youth of today.
But what if I told you that amongst all the seemingly moronic disarray of a teenager's vocabulary, there is evidence of a more complex etymology behind some of their insults?
I was surprised to hear a group of teenage boys running around a shopping centre calling each other 'plebs'- (an insult insinuating that someone is mentally incompetent or below them). 'Pleb' can be interpreted as a shortened version of 'plebian' meaning 'peasant-like', deriving from the Latin 'plebes' which translates as 'common people'. This elitist insult is, ironically, predominantly used by teenagers brought up in a lower class environment, and, more ironically, the users of the insult usually do not understand the meaning of it.
'Cretin'- another increasingly popular insult- also has an interesting etymology behind it; deriving from the French 'crétin' itself deriving from the Alpine dialect 'crestin' meaning 'a dwarfed and deformed idiot'- which is the basis for the insult. 'Cretinism', named after the French 'crestin', is a condition of stunted physical and mental growth caused by congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones; hence the 'dwarfed and deformed idiot'.
So, whether or not they realise it, young people are using insults handed down to them by their bad-mouthed ancestors through the generations, and that their granny was no less of a heckler than they think they rebelliously are.