In spite of this, piling up the karma on this comment makes me feel better about LW. When no one else had made this point on the original post, and then the points were slow to show up on this comment, I was beginning to wonder about the cluefulness level.
I haven’t felt this way about any of my other comments.
I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t) is a book about women and shame, with a little about men. I’d been wondering why such a high proportion of insults (to both men and women) are about sexual attractiveness, but the book points out that the most stinging insults are about failure to fulfill gender expectations. At the time, I hadn’t thought about men being accused of homosexuality, but that fits the pattern from the book.
If I were to get evolutionary about this, cutting down one’s rivals’ mating potential would make sense as a fundamental attack.
On the other hand, I don’t think the author was collecting cross cultural material, so I don’t know what insults/shame looks like in cultures where religious prejudice is a larger factor.
None of this is intended as an attack on lukeprog (2007)-- it’s clear he had no idea what he was doing. My guess is that he was trying to be less insulting by making the breakup less personal.
On the other hand, I don’t think the author was collecting cross cultural material, so I don’t know what insults/shame looks like in cultures where religious prejudice is a larger factor.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but insult content varies quite a bit across cultures. Dutch profanity is largely medical, for example; kankerlijer (“cancer-sufferer”) is very strong. I’ve heard speculation that this is due to the largely urban landscape that Dutch evolved in, where being a vector of infection (never mind that most causes of cancer aren’t infectious) meant being a clear danger to the community.
So religious insults seem plausible in any culture that takes religion especially seriously. Spanish profanity has retained a lot of religious content; I don’t know much about its evolution, but it could plausibly be related to Spanish-speaking culture’s historically strong Catholicism.
My suggestion of random factors means that there’s no detailed explanation possible, except for history which is almost certainly based in spoken words and emotional reactions and therefore not available.
I believe that it’s the tone which makes an insult. Insult is about lowering status, and is basically a group effect—a good insult implies not just likelihood of ongoing attack from that person, but that the attacks will deservedly continue from other people.
It seems to me that cultures are probably constrained to ranges by various issues (number of people, technology, resources), but those ranges are huge compared to the particular things cultures do, and there’s little point in predicting.
American slang will probably generate new words for very good and very bad, but this doesn’t mean that which words are used for very good and very bad has an interesting or predictable pattern. The words will probably be short, but I doubt you can get much farther than that.
I wonder whether insults could be used to track patterns of obligatory kindness—if some feature is not used as grounds for insult, could it mean that it’s a area which is culturally inhibited from attack. In other words, I’m still shocked at using having cancer as a generic insult.
It’s worth noting that not every piece of social interaction has a non-trivial influence from evolutionary psychology. Sometimes an insult is just an insult...
It’s worth noting that not every piece of social interaction has a non-trivial influence from evolutionary psychology. Sometimes an insult is just an insult...
Of all the forms of communication over which to trivialize evolutionary psychology you chose insults? Knowing how, when and who to insult is one of the most critical instincts evolutionary psychology provided us!
And the exact specific insults chosen is pretty darn culture-bound. “Stupid melon” is only a serious insult in Chinese.
(To clarify: I am talking about the semantics of the words chosen as insults, not the behavior of socially insulting another for whatever reason. I do not think the specific words common in current English parlance as insults by a specific social group can be meaningfully applied to humanity as a whole)
I’m more dubious about ev psych than most here, I think. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is random history affecting which insults are salient in various societies, rather than some sort of optimization.
The fact that people can insult each other so easily may well have some evolutionary history.
Any theories about why people are so apt to remember insults for years?
It wouldn’t surprise me if there is random history affecting which insults are salient in various societies, rather
than some sort of optimization.
I’m a bit of a polyglot who’s sampled broadly from some very, very different language families and that rings true.
You can be insulting in Chinook Wawa or Ojibwe (speaking disrespectfully or very bluntly), but cognates for most familiar English swears are either lacking altogether or of very recent coinage. The closest you’d get to everyday, non-personal swearing in Chinook Wawa sort of means “eeeewww”; the word “bad” could be a matter-of-fact descriptor, a vaguely-literal or nonliteral grammatical particle, or just a very blunt statement more impolite than anything.
Chinese has quite a varied vocabulary for profanity and insults, but the literal translations would almost sound cutesy to foreigners (傻瓜, “sha3gua1” in Mandarin, means “stupid melon” but has about as much social bite as “idiot!” or “dumbass!”).
Japanese has a lot of profane words, except that it’s much easier to be insulting without actually using any of them and some of the ones whose literal translation would be profane or impolite in English are used with much less weight. This is true of some dialects of Chinese too (there’s a phrase that probably best translates as “holy fuck” in both Chinese and Japanese but isn’t nearly as impolite as its English equivalent, although it’s not exactly good manners either.)
In spite of this, piling up the karma on this comment makes me feel better about LW. When no one else had made this point on the original post, and then the points were slow to show up on this comment, I was beginning to wonder about the cluefulness level.
I haven’t felt this way about any of my other comments.
I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t) is a book about women and shame, with a little about men. I’d been wondering why such a high proportion of insults (to both men and women) are about sexual attractiveness, but the book points out that the most stinging insults are about failure to fulfill gender expectations. At the time, I hadn’t thought about men being accused of homosexuality, but that fits the pattern from the book.
If I were to get evolutionary about this, cutting down one’s rivals’ mating potential would make sense as a fundamental attack.
On the other hand, I don’t think the author was collecting cross cultural material, so I don’t know what insults/shame looks like in cultures where religious prejudice is a larger factor.
None of this is intended as an attack on lukeprog (2007)-- it’s clear he had no idea what he was doing. My guess is that he was trying to be less insulting by making the breakup less personal.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, but insult content varies quite a bit across cultures. Dutch profanity is largely medical, for example; kankerlijer (“cancer-sufferer”) is very strong. I’ve heard speculation that this is due to the largely urban landscape that Dutch evolved in, where being a vector of infection (never mind that most causes of cancer aren’t infectious) meant being a clear danger to the community.
So religious insults seem plausible in any culture that takes religion especially seriously. Spanish profanity has retained a lot of religious content; I don’t know much about its evolution, but it could plausibly be related to Spanish-speaking culture’s historically strong Catholicism.
Thanks—the Dutch sickness insults are amazing by American standards.
If it was just about fear of infection, then all urban cultures would have that sort of insult.
Yeah, it does have the ring of a Just-So story, doesn’t it? I haven’t heard any other explanations yet, though.
My suggestion of random factors means that there’s no detailed explanation possible, except for history which is almost certainly based in spoken words and emotional reactions and therefore not available.
I believe that it’s the tone which makes an insult. Insult is about lowering status, and is basically a group effect—a good insult implies not just likelihood of ongoing attack from that person, but that the attacks will deservedly continue from other people.
It seems to me that cultures are probably constrained to ranges by various issues (number of people, technology, resources), but those ranges are huge compared to the particular things cultures do, and there’s little point in predicting.
American slang will probably generate new words for very good and very bad, but this doesn’t mean that which words are used for very good and very bad has an interesting or predictable pattern. The words will probably be short, but I doubt you can get much farther than that.
I wonder whether insults could be used to track patterns of obligatory kindness—if some feature is not used as grounds for insult, could it mean that it’s a area which is culturally inhibited from attack. In other words, I’m still shocked at using having cancer as a generic insult.
It’s worth noting that not every piece of social interaction has a non-trivial influence from evolutionary psychology. Sometimes an insult is just an insult...
Of all the forms of communication over which to trivialize evolutionary psychology you chose insults? Knowing how, when and who to insult is one of the most critical instincts evolutionary psychology provided us!
And the exact specific insults chosen is pretty darn culture-bound. “Stupid melon” is only a serious insult in Chinese.
(To clarify: I am talking about the semantics of the words chosen as insults, not the behavior of socially insulting another for whatever reason. I do not think the specific words common in current English parlance as insults by a specific social group can be meaningfully applied to humanity as a whole)
I’m more dubious about ev psych than most here, I think. It wouldn’t surprise me if there is random history affecting which insults are salient in various societies, rather than some sort of optimization.
The fact that people can insult each other so easily may well have some evolutionary history.
Any theories about why people are so apt to remember insults for years?
I’m a bit of a polyglot who’s sampled broadly from some very, very different language families and that rings true.
You can be insulting in Chinook Wawa or Ojibwe (speaking disrespectfully or very bluntly), but cognates for most familiar English swears are either lacking altogether or of very recent coinage. The closest you’d get to everyday, non-personal swearing in Chinook Wawa sort of means “eeeewww”; the word “bad” could be a matter-of-fact descriptor, a vaguely-literal or nonliteral grammatical particle, or just a very blunt statement more impolite than anything.
Chinese has quite a varied vocabulary for profanity and insults, but the literal translations would almost sound cutesy to foreigners (傻瓜, “sha3gua1” in Mandarin, means “stupid melon” but has about as much social bite as “idiot!” or “dumbass!”).
Japanese has a lot of profane words, except that it’s much easier to be insulting without actually using any of them and some of the ones whose literal translation would be profane or impolite in English are used with much less weight. This is true of some dialects of Chinese too (there’s a phrase that probably best translates as “holy fuck” in both Chinese and Japanese but isn’t nearly as impolite as its English equivalent, although it’s not exactly good manners either.)