Direct and Indirect Verbal and Bodily Insults and Other Forms of Aggressive Communication - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 250

political discourse to Lega followers, referring to Kienge, says: “When I look at her, I can't
help thinking of an orangutan.”

According to our definition given earlier, this is a pragmatically indirect insult,
though a very slightly indirect one: not many inferences are necessary to catch its
meaning.
(23) Some days later, during a public talk by Minister Cécile Kienge, someone threw two
bananas at her.

An indirect bodily insult: a creative gesture again implying inclusion of Kienge
in the degrading category of orangutans.
(24) Later again, a picture is published with Calderoli as an orangutan, with the caption:
“ Orango padano ” (Orangutan from Padania)

A verbal and visual direct counterinsult.
A way to recover from the continuous escalation of insults and counterinsults is
to accept the provocation carried by the insult and to turn a prospective defeat into
a gain of power.
(25) On 27 April 2014, a racist fan during a game hurls a banana toward Dani Alves, a
black Brazilian soccer player. Alves picks it up, peels it, and eats it . He is overcoming the
offense of being included in the degreading category of apes by taking a proactive attitude,
without insulting his insulter. His act indirectly means: “I don't care about you and your
insults. You are not so important to me that I'm offended by a stupid provocation. I am
better than you.” From then on, eating a banana becomes a symbol of a struggle to combat
racism, but a struggle that makes fun of it, and thus diminishes it.

13.5 Aggressive Communication on the Web:

Some Real Examples

To test the descriptive adequacy of the foregoing distinctions, we conducted an
empirical study on a case of aggressive communication on social media.
During a parliamentary session over pending legislation, members of the Movi-
mento 5 Stelle, a political movement led by Beppe Grillo, tried to launch a filibuster,
stretching out the discussion with long talks to block the approval, but President
Boldrini applied the “guillotine”, a legal technique to break down the discussion, to
have the law approved in time. Boldrini was then strongly attacked by all followers
of Beppe Grillo on his Facebook page.
We extracted a corpus of 12,038 words from this interaction (D'Errico et al.
2014 ). In this corpus, several categories of aggressive communication were singled
out.

13.5.1 Direct Insult to Second Person (Addressee D Target)

A first category comprises insults in their most canonical form: they are addressed
directly to the target and phrased in the form “You are an X” ( boldrini sei una vergogna