Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 240

may be considered elliptical with respect to words mentioning the cursing
intention, as a brief form for:
(7) May your mother's vagina be cursed

or

(8) May the soul of your dead ancestors be cursed

Both imperative and optative curses are directly addressed to the target (tar-
get D addressee), and their literal meaning is to order or to wish, respectively,
a highly destructive action or event against the target, but this in turn aims at
communicating: I do not want to have any more social interaction with you!
What events and emotions generally trigger curses? A typical antecedent is that
the target performed some misdeed to the detriment of the sender. This serious,
unjust damage triggers three mental states in the sender: first, an emotion of anger,
typically monitoring the sense of injustice; second, a desire for revenge that is
sometimes so overwhelming that no human might carry it out and that could be
adequately performed only by some omnipotent entity. This is the point of wishing
a very disrupting event on the other. But anger is too short term an emotion to be
felt for such a person and such a misdeed; what leaks out from the curse is a more
long-term, indestructible feeling, hate, which is something like a long-term anger.
And hate triggers, in its turn, a goal of severing any future relationship with the
other, who made himself guilty of such a misdeed.
Therefore, in optative curses the literal goal is to ask a third entity to have
something bad happen to the target, while in imperative curses the sender asks for a
somewhat self-defeating action from the target (and addressee) himself; but in both
cases the indirect meaning is to communicate the sender's rejection to the target.

13.3.2 Imprecation

An imprecation can be seen as an optative curse or an insult addressed to some
inanimate object or, again, to a third entity that one holds responsible for an unlucky
event. For example, Damn! means: I appeal to a third entity (addressee) to make the
target be damned .
What events and emotions trigger an imprecation? Typically “ Damn! ” might be
uttered, for example, if you stumble in the dark and bang on a chair, or you are
going for a picnic and a storm is approaching. In such cases you curse the chair or
the weather: that is, by a somewhat animistic attitude, you are making those things
responsible for a misdeed that harmed you in some way. This may trigger your
anger - an emotion sometimes only felt in connection with the bare frustration of
a goal, not necessarily some actual injustice - but not necessarily revenge or hate:
(Only if the animistic attitude is very strong could one feel that a social relationship
was previously held and, hence, now explicitly reject it.)