Children, before they are ever taught the swear words of the adult world, create their own language of pejoratives. Poopy head or fart mouth may not carry much weight for adults but to a kid, that’s just shy of dropping an N-bomb on someone. Humanity seems to need a verbal outlet for our more caustic feeling toward others and where none exist we invent our own.
Those Little ol’ Four Letter Words
The core principle behind any insult is two-fold, it is a way to hurt someone and to lower their perceived status. Humans can be incredibly complex but our behaviors can be broken down into much more simple components. When confronted with someone we don’t like the first impulse is to get them away from you. The easiest way to make that happen is to hurt them. Since physical violence is off the table in most cases we are left with only the emotional option.
We strike at not the flesh but the ego and the social position. Seeking to wound social standing and make ourselves repugnant to the person we attack so they will avoid us in the future. For all our independence of thought, we are a hierarchical species. Through insults, true or not, one can convince themselves that the person they dislike is beneath them in social standing, stripping away their achievements and personality to bare basics and making an easy caricature to hate
God Damn *******!
Slurs are by far, more dehumanizing and more interesting. While most insults have been used in one fashion or another for hundreds of years slurs can rise and fall within a generation. Slurs my father knew which revolved around the Asia regions or European stereotypes were brought home from wars by our soldiers and proliferated for one or two generations and that was it.
Today many of these forbidden words and phrases simply cannot be found out in the wild anymore. If you were to tell a person from my generation one of these slurs the most common response is a puzzled “why were they called that” followed swiftly by a horrified expression once it’s explained. Our generation is not slur-less however, for every slur shed a new one rises from the deep festering well of hatred that is our communal heritage.
America seems the best example of a society struggling with this. A civil war and a social revolution are key factors in creating a deep abiding anger on any side of a conflict. America has also embraced the dichotomy that is a slur only being a slur when used by a certain class of people. This is often argued as a good thing as the people being slurred can “take back” the word and make it a positive. However, over the course of three or four generations, all this seems to have done is make the slur stronger. While similar words die between generations American slurs stand strong and untouched by time.
You Are Not People.
Name calling, insults and slurs no matter the source or cause all share a common underlying theme: “they are not people like I am people”. It is the primal categorization of someone as an outsider, the first step in validating their destruction. With the advent of social media, it has become easier and easier to reach out to those we disagree with and cast the first stone. NPC, Russian Bot, Troll, Fascist, Nazi, SJW when used against someone are from the same place, that fetid rotting feeling that someone else doesn’t deserve to be considered with the same care as yourself. It is a sickness that is slowly spreading replacing honest debate with mudslinging and caterwauls
When you encounter something you disagree with and your first impulse is to respond with an insult stop. Take a minute and analyze that feeling, an insult isn’t a rebuttal it’s the first step in ignoring the humanity of your opponent. Once our opponents are not considered people anymore it is a very slippery slope from emotional violence to physical. We’ve all seen what that entails again and again and again throughout history. Let’s try to be the first generation that learns that lesson.