Flake, cow, loser, slut, idiot, airhead, trash, penguin, creep, moron, midget, freak, Oompa-Loompa, nobody.

It’s another day in the kitchen of Andy Polizzi — volunteer firefighter, auto salvage manager and father of Nicole Polizzi, the 4-foot-9-inch Snooki, yowling star of “Jersey Shore” — and words cannot hurt him. Sticks and stones! After a season of the hit reality show about a bunch of Italian-Americans sharing a beach house, Andy is used to the terrible stuff that people say about his little girl, and if he had to, he looks built enough under his “Papa Snooks” T-shirt to take them down.

He has welcomed a reporter into his home, a ranch in the middle of the ranchlands and big riding-tractor front lawns of Marlboro, N.Y., across the river from Poughkeepsie, amid the orchards and dairy bars off Route 9W. There’s a swimming pool in the backyard stuffed with water toys and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside, the house has the snug plenitude of a man who likes his comforts close at hand. He has been divorced 10 years.

But he has to be honest, he said, folding his arms on the kitchen table: He doesn’t understand the public’s fascination with his daughter.

“When we go to venues, I like to stand out in the crowd,” he said. “She’ll be up there hooting and hollering, and I’ll say to someone, ‘What is it that draws you to my daughter? Be honest.’ Because it’s very hard for me to see what it is. She don’t sing. She don’t dance. I don’t want to say she don’t have talent ...” He seemed to have his doubts. Then he shrugged. “Everyone basically says they can relate to her. I think Nicole’s just a likeable person.”

He went along in this worn rut of relatedness and just-folks-like-us celebrity bunkum — for, alas, fame has come to him, too — and then, hearing his daughter coming noisily down the hall from the garage, he said quickly, “Let me ask you: What do you think of the show and what do you think of Nicole?”

Ah.

Opinions abound
Everybody seems to have an opinion about “Jersey Shore,” which begins its second season on MTV on Thursday night. Italian-American groups hate it because the cast members — Snooki, Mike (The Situation), Jenni (JWoww), Pauly D and the rest — are into “Guidos” and “Guidettes,” and how much gel they can pump into their hair before they make the chicken parm. In the first episode, Snooki got drunk, threw up and passed out.

The obsession about tanning and the gym has led to parodies on YouTube. Even President Obama has weighed in on Snooki’s scarily dark tan, referring to it because of a proposed tanning-bed tax. Senator John McCain Twittered her. (“I do rec wearing sunscreen!”)

The action takes place in Seaside Heights and, at least for part of the new season, in South Beach. Since the show’s personalities are painted with broad strokes (the better for the rest of us to mock them), you accept that the housemates have no other aim than partying and avoiding a “grenade” in the hot tub (the guys’ term for an ugly chick). Clearly the series relies on the chem-lab formula used by other reality shows, in which volatile and juvenile temperaments are thrown together for fun explosions.

Yet while such behavioral snippets compelled some 4.8 million people to watch “Jersey Shore” at the end of the first season — almost triple the number of viewers for the premiere last December — the main point of outrage on blogs is that the show has absolutely no redeeming value.

“The adventures of the most irrelevant people on earth,” as someone wrote recently on a gossip blog. And even viewers who claim to love “Jersey Shore” usually find it hard to say why.

“Everything about this show is super-sized — from the over-the-top hair to the over-the-top nature of the comments,” said Robert J. Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University. If you can’t tell, he’s an avid fan. “ ‘Jersey Shore’ is brilliantly cast and, of course, Snooki is the star,” he said. “The name doesn’t hurt for a start.”

And she’s short, drawing our attention like a berserk windup toy. “And she’s so loud,” Professor Thompson exclaimed. “Her dialect is ratcheted up 1,000 volts.”

'A spray-painted Chihuahua'
That Snooki is not conventionally attractive — “A spray-painted Chihuahua,” Mike (The Situation) said when he first saw her — has a lot to do with why she is the breakout member of the cast. She is busty and short-waisted with small legs; sort of like a turnip turned on its tip. There is the weird tan, but the pièce de résistance of Snookiness is the half-doughnut-shaped pouf on top of her head.

The pouf has been her signature, along with her frisky nickname, since she was in high school in Marlboro, where she was a cheerleader. “The pouf is like a Guidette thing, and usually on teen night all the girls did it,” she explained when I first met her, in May, in South Beach. “Eventually all my friends grew out of it and went to straight hair.”

With a blank look, she shrugged. “Me, I like the pouf. I’m still going to rock it.”

Snooki has a way of putting herself together that while in some ways is atrocious, is completely identifiable to her and consistent with her attention-seeking personality. She wears short, clingy dresses in a pattern or with some metallic trim, huge enameled or bejeweled hoop earrings and glittery high heels.

Lots of 22-year-old women wear revealing clothes, but they may not have her body shape, and it’s a safe bet they’re not rocking a pouf. Though that may change when a line of Snooki hair products comes out. Anyway, the effect has been interesting. “If you were to draw a cartoon of her, you would know immediately who she is,” said Chris Linn, the executive vice president for pilots at MTV. “She’s an icon.”