Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 242

organs and actions (Galli de' Paratesi 1969 ). (For example, fuck is a bad word,
have intercourse is not.)

Bad words differ from curses and imprecations in that they are not whole
communicative acts: a bad word can be uttered in communicative acts with different
performatives. I can use bloody in an interrogative sentence:
(9) Where did you put my bloody coat?

or in an imperative sentence:
(10) Give me that bloody topic!

or in an informative one:
(11) I hate this bloody weather .

If used as an interjection (e.g. Shit! ), a bad word conveys a whole communicative
act of imprecation.
A bad word, if used as a communicative act or within one, has the goal of adding
emphasis to the act itself but may also express or communicate anger and possibly a
goal of aggression stemming from an unwelcome event, in this case addressing the
one held responsible for it. Bad words are a case of “dysphemism”: words loaded
with negative evaluation and aggressive import, both for their very meaning and,
possibly, because of their harsh sound or the sensation of friction or obtrusion of
their production that, if simulated or reproduced by the receiver, thanks to mirror
neurons, may give him the same sensation of harsh production as for the sender.
Therefore, they often make up part of curses, imprecations, and insults, enhancing
their load of aggression, yet they must be carefully distinguished from them.

13.3.4 Insults

An insult is a whole communicative act produced by a sender with the deliberate
intent of offending a target entity T (a person, a group, even an object, for example,
the symbol of an ideology or an institution), and it does so by attributing a very
negative property to the target, finally including him in a category that is degrading
for him, in such a way as to spoil the target's image and (in the case of a person) the
target's self-image, too.

13.3.4.1 Intent to Offend

To feel offended means to feel that another person has a worse image of us than the
one we want to project. But a person T may feel offended even without a deliberate
intention of offending on the part of another person S.