Well said. English is not so much a language as an extremely dysfunctional form of low-level telepathy, in which everyone broadcasts their thoughts on a different wavelength and hopes that the receiver is tuned to be capable of interpreting it correctly.
Not really, I was just trying to think of specifically British slang. The only other example I could think of was "danglies" which is a body part rather than a whole person.
As I said, it's not an "insult" because it describes a body part rather than a person, which is why I didn't use it in the first post of this discussion; it's a vulgarism, so it came to mind when brainstorming rude things to call someone in British, but didn't fit the context. I've probably absorbed a few of these from other sources (Monty Python or Dr. Who perhaps?) but the source I'm sure of is the character "Spike" on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as he is both from England and extremely profane.
Ah, the Britishness of a fictional character who is neither played by a British actor nor written by a British writer nor directed by a British director. That truly represents Britishness about as much as my extremely poor impression of my friend from Albuquerque saying "Hi there pretty girl!" to my dog represents the US, or my appalling stereotyped Australian phrases which are specifically designed to wind up my Aussie friends reflect them.
Did Spike really refer to someone as a "dangly"? As in "you are a dangly"?
It's just not a word we use like that unless we're deliberately trying to sound like a baby or something. Sure, you might kick someone in the danglies, if you were a 6-year-old-boy who couldn't say a less infantile word like maybe "bollocks". It's the equivalent of talking about you pee-pee or pointing out a moo-cow.
I was hoping for a philosophical treatise on the nature of insults in modern social discourse. Or at the very least that someone had really gone off on someone else in another topic and it got split off here so we could all watch. Color me disappointed.
If the comment is not meant to be insulting and is not taken to be, then it is not insulting.
If the comment is meant to be insulting and is taken to be, then in is insulting.
If the comment is meant to be insulting but is not taken to be, then it is certainly an insult, just not an effective or accurate one.
If the comment is not meant to be insulting but is taken to be... well, then it gets tricky. An obviously innocuous comment is not really an insult, where as an obviously extremely offensive comment is (with 'obviously' taken to mean it's obvious to all except the insulter/insultee). In the middle, things get really fuzzy.
I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
What kind of an insult is that, you verminous excuse for a flea-bitten ungluate?
Incidentally, these kinds of insults (which are clearly meant to be insults, but not meant to be insulting) belong in a category of their own that I'm not sure how to classify. They're not meant insultingly, and (I hope) not taken as insults, and yet…
The title of this newly-split topic…sounds a bit unfriendly. Perhaps it should be clarified "Discussion of insults" or something.
Oh yes, quite a few things! I like SOTM, obviously, and I like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I often like Monty Python and I at least sometimes like Dr. Who. I also like a variety of things not mentioned in the quoted post, including but not limited to cat macros, cute puppy pictures (actual puppies are sometimes even more cute, but have undesireable side effects if usage is continued beyond the extremely short term, so I mostly just stick with pictures), hyper-realistic fantasy art, the novels of David Brin, Iain M. Banks, Larry Niven and numerous others less immediately at the tip of my tongue, a significant percentage of other games of various sorts (some of which I like almost as much as SOTM, at least one or two I actually like to an equal or perhaps slighter degree, and several levels that I like less than SOTM but still wish to play at times), Kentucky Fried Chicken and/or Popeye's, the local restaurant Hell's Kitchen when I can afford it (not to be confused with the Gordon Ramsay reality TV show or the New York City neighborhood), having more money than I know what to do with, being free to sleep late in the morning and stay up all night, staying in hotels, reading Wikipedia and TVTropes articles when I have that kind of free time, fancy self-serve frozen yogurt shops, the textures of silk and cashmere, and various increasingly not-family-friendly topics which thereafter come to mind, nudge nudge wink wink say no more.
It's just that I tend to take these things for granted, feel entitled to enjoy them every moment that I am conscious, and complain bitterly about anything I am forced to put up with which is even slightly wrong according to my standards. So I tend to talk about all of the above things much less than I discuss, say, world politics, economic woes, or unsatisfying rules in SOTM or any other game.
No, as I clarified once before, that was NOT a word I could use as an insult for a person. I say this in the least insulting tone I can manage: you would find me easier to understand if you would carefully read what I am actually saying, rather than glancing at my statements and attempting to apprehend their overall meaning based on some possibly-inaccurate assumption you've made. (Actually, everyone would probably find everyone else easier to understand if they did that. We as a species really probably ought to try it sometime.)
Sure, you might kick someone in the danglies
That was pretty much the context he was using it in, except it might have been more along the lines of suggesting that someone grow a pair thereof. I forget the exact details but he was not using it as a name for a person, as I stated in a previous post, and then again above.
if you were a 6-year-old-boy who couldn't say a less infantile word like maybe "bollocks".
Oh, he uses that one too, of course. It's likely that the non-British Wheedon (like myself, up until you pointed out otherwise) considered them interchangeable - equally impolite terms for an impolite body part, used by an impolite member of a society that we Yanks perceive as alternating between exquisite politeness and startling lack thereof, both of which we view as tremendously entertaining (except for like old grannies and sheltered religious types, who probably don't react so positively to the second category).
Ah. Indeed I can. I can also, and did, edit the post immediately above yours, a couple of times, to include responses to earlier bits of the thread. If I have any further such responses, I will instead edit them into this post. (Also, this is a self-reference.)