By Jerome Neu
"Sticks and stones may well holiday my bones yet phrases won't ever harm me." This schoolyard rhyme tasks an invulnerability to verbal insults that sounds stable yet earrings fake. certainly, the necessity for one of these verse belies its personal claims. for many folks, feeling insulted is a distressing-and distressingly common-experience.
In Sticks and Stones, thinker Jerome Neu probes the character, goal, and results of insults, exploring how and why they humiliate, embarrass, infuriate, and wound us so deeply. what sort of damage is an insult? Is it decided by means of the insulter or the insulted? What does it exhibit concerning the personality of either events in addition to the nature of society and its conventions? What function does insult play in social and felony existence? whilst is telling the reality an insult? Neu attracts upon a wealth of examples and anecdotes-as good as various perspectives from Aristotle and Oliver Wendell Holmes to Oscar Wilde, John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn, and plenty of others-to offer brilliant solutions to those questions. He indicates that what we discover insulting can show a lot approximately our rules of personality, honor, gender, the character of speech acts, and social and criminal conventions. He considers how insults, either intentional and accidental, make themselves felt-in play, Freudian slips, insult humor, rituals, blasphemy, libel, slander, and hate speech. And he investigates the insult's notable energy, why it may so speedy destabilize our experience of self and threaten our ethical identification, the very heart of our self-respect and self-esteem.
enjoyable, funny, and deeply insightful, Sticks and Stones unpacks the interesting dynamics of a phenomenon extra usually painfully skilled than basically understood.
Read Online or Download Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults PDF
Similar culture books
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Selected through the hot York occasions publication overview as a striking e-book of the 12 months
the writer of the recent York occasions bestseller The Stuff of inspiration bargains a debatable heritage of violence.
Faced with the ceaseless circulate of reports approximately battle, crime, and terrorism, one can simply imagine we are living within the such a lot violent age ever obvious. but as manhattan instances bestselling writer Steven Pinker exhibits during this startling and interesting new paintings, simply the other is precise: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we might be residing within the so much peaceable time in our species's lifestyles. for many of historical past, struggle, slavery, infanticide, baby abuse, assassinations, pogroms, ugly punishments, lethal quarrels, and genocide have been traditional gains of lifestyles. yet at the present time, Pinker indicates (with assistance from greater than 100 graphs and maps) most of these kinds of violence have faded and are commonly condemned. How has this happened?
This groundbreaking publication maintains Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, blending psychology and background to supply a notable photo of an more and more nonviolent global. the most important, he explains, is to appreciate our intrinsic explanations- the internal demons that incline us towards violence and the higher angels that steer us away-and how altering situations have allowed our larger angels to be successful. Exploding fatalist myths approximately humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this formidable and provocative ebook is certain to be hotly debated in residing rooms and the Pentagon alike, and should problem and alter the best way we take into consideration our society.
The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art
The situation of tradition is a serious ethnography of the West in its altering kin with different societies. studying cultural practices equivalent to anthropology, go back and forth writing, accumulating, and museum screens of tribal paintings, Clifford indicates authoritative bills of alternative methods of lifestyles to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts.
Americana: Dispatches From the New Frontier
Harley-Davidson bikers . . . Grand Canyon river rats. . . Mormon archaeologists. . . Spelling bee prodigies…
For greater than fifteen years, best-selling writer and historian Hampton facets has traveled largely around the continent exploring the the US that lurks simply at the back of the scrim of our mainstream tradition. Reporting for out of doors, the hot Yorker, and NPR, between different nationwide media, the award-winning journalist has verified a name not just as a wry observer of the modern American scene but in addition as one in every of our extra artistic and flexible practitioners of narrative non-fiction.
In those dozen items, gathered right here for the 1st time, facets offers us a clean, beautiful, and now and then startling the United States brimming with attention-grabbing subcultures and weird characters who might stay nowhere else. Following aspects, we crash the redwood retreat of an obvious cabal of fabulously strong military-industrialists, drop in at the Indy 500 of bass fishing, and sign up for an immense techno-rave on the lip of the Grand Canyon. We meet a various gallery of yankee visionaries— from the impossibly perky founding father of Tupperware to Indian radical Russell skill to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk. We retrace the course of the old Bataan demise March with veterans from Sides’ acclaimed WWII epic, Ghost infantrymen. facets additionally examines the country that has emerged from the ashes of September eleven, recounting the harrowing trips of 3 global alternate heart survivors and identifying on the final attainable minute to not "embed" at the Iraqi front-lines with the U. S. Marines. Americana offers us a glowing mosaic of our kingdom this present day, in all its wild and poignant charm.
Society and tradition reclaims the classical history, presents a clear-eyed overview of the promise of sociology within the twenty first century and asks even if the `cultural flip' has made the learn of society redundant. Sociologists have objected to the increase of cultural reports considering it produces cultural relativism and lacks a solid learn schedule.
- Mechademia 6: User Enhanced
- Japanese Culture
- B.F. Skinner and behaviorism in American culture
- Crafting the Culture and History of French Chocolate
- Cells and Tissues in Culture Methods, Biology and Physiology
Extra resources for Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults
Example text
Does it matter whether I am in fact the worst stickball player? Does it matter whether the choosers have other motives? Say I am an excellent stickball player, but they don’t like me? Or suppose I am a middling stickball player, but they mean to insult me? If I am a poor player and the choosers are motivated only by priorities internal to the point of the game, I still may be hurt. Is it because they did not allow personal attachment and concern to override those priorities? ) Is it because their choice forces me to recognize my inadequacies?
Its basic currency and measurement is the “shame” of women, by which Mediterraneanists mean female sexual chastity.
ON FEELING INSULTED 19 ness, with forethought, even with malice—in the ordinary sense of ill will as motive) and unintentionally (by inadvertence, by negligence, by insensitivity, by presumption). Both can be felt as painful. Usually intentional harms are thought to be worse than negligent ones for a variety of reasons: because they involve an additional or more severe injury, or reflect a worse character, or perhaps because they are less likely to be preventable by a simple raising of awareness.