From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed May 07 2003 - 22:52:09 MDT
At 08:51 PM 5/7/03 -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
>I don't really grok
>Damien's "assessment" analysis or its relevance, but I do
>think that he's right to question the *role* that the
>terms are playing here. I liken the use of "idiot" to that
>of "shit!". It seems to be like an expletive, having little
>or no objective meaning, but instead useful as indicating the
>speaker's judgment (or assessment), or emotional disposition.
All speech is likely to be multivalent or polysemic, but in this case I
think you're missing the deeper social implications. Why would anyone in
dispute with another seek to convey their emotional disposition? To `let
off steam', perhaps; that is, the verbal outburst substitutes for a punch
in the mouth, costly behavior liable to get out of control. But for social
animals like us, it looks to me primarily like a control mechanism. Nobody
wants to be despised, especially as an *idiot* (a term of abuse and
disparagement that children bandy about to great effect). If I call you a
fuckwit, it's not to inform you of my provisional scientific opinion; it's
to give you pause, to wound you, to make you modify your behavior so that
in future you'll be less like to act that way.
This function might be less apparent to the INTJ pugnacious quasi-isolates
on a list like this one. :)
Damien Broderick
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