Historians constantly seek new windows into the past, and one which has proved particularly fruitful of late is litigation for verbal injury. For early modern North America Peter N. Moogk thinks that court hearings for defamation are ‘likely to disclose the mental climate of a society’, while Mary Beth Norton thinks that from such suits ‘we can identify the types of behaviour a society most abhors’. The gendered nature of insults has been a core theme of Laura Gowing's work, and must form a component of any consideration of the subject. This article looks at defamation cases in two commissary courts – in Edinburgh and Argyll – between 1750 and 1800 in order to see what they reveal about Scottish society at that time.