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On the bus the young boy S gives up his seat to a lady of 60 . She is offended because she
thinks he has an image of her as an old lady who needs a seat on the bus.
Here S did not intend to communicate that he has of T an image of an “old” lady, but
yet she may feel offended to the extent to which she attributes to him this intention.
In some cases, S does have the goal of making T understand that S has a lower
image of T than the one T wants to project. This is the case with insults, in which
the sender has the goal of communicating not only that he includes the target in the
degrading category but also that he does so with the goal of offending the target
(Castelfranchi 1988 ).
13.3.4.2
Negative Property and Degrading Category
To attribute a very negative property to the target, the sender attacks the core of
his identity, that is, he communicates that he considers the target as belonging
to a “degrading category,” one primarily characterized by that negative property
and considered on a lower - less noble - level than the one the target (at least
based on the sender's assumption) pretends to belong to, for instance, a category
of people of a lower race, a lower social class, or even nonhumans, animals, or
objects. The characterization of this degrading category is achieved through the
devices of dehumanization, mechanization, and the like (Zamperini and Menegatto
2015 ), possibly ending with the most severe, on this scale, of negative properties:
nonexistence, which is evoked by insults like “You're a nothing,” or in deliberately
and ostentatiously ignoring the target.
13.3.4.3
Spoiling the Target's Image and Self-Image
Since the goal of an insult is to spoil the target's image, in this scene we may count
two or three actors: (1) the sender, or insulter, the one who performs the insult; (2)
the target or insulted, the one who should suffer from the offense of the insult; and,
possibly, (3) the audience, one or more persons who witness S's act but are not
directly involved in it.
An interesting issue is whether the addressee of an insult must necessarily be
the target: we might claim that when the attribution of the negative property or
degrading category is only communicated to an audience, this might be gossip,
accusation, calumny, or talking badly of someone, but not an insult. We will try
to answer this question in the empirical study of Sect. 13.5 .
13.3.5
Bad Words, Imprecations, Curses, and Insults
An insult differs from an imprecation or a curse in that it is not an optative or
an imperative but an informative act (or even only a vocative, as we shall see
subsequently) that mentions a negative evaluation of the target and communicates it
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