Bashi-bazouk

A bashi-bazouk (in Turkish başıbozuk, meaning leaderless) was an irregular mounted mercenary soldier of the Ottoman army. The bashi-bazouk were notorious for being brutal and indisciplined. They were recruited from homeless, vagrants, criminals, slaves and prisoners of war. Foreign mercenaries and volunteers could also be hired to the corps.

In Hergé's Tintin comic book series, Captain Haddock, a whisky drinking ex-seafarer who was Tintin's friend and adventure partner in many of the later stories, used "Bashi-bazouk", along with many others terms such as "australopithecus" and "troglodyte", as one of his signature insults when he was (not infrequently) angered by some other character in the story.