“Now take out the trash you pasty peasant”. How Texan High School Students Realize Counter-Insults

Scientific Study from the year 2018 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, grade: 1,7, University of Bonn (IAAK), language: English, abstract: To express the strongest human emotions such as anger, people often choose to use hurtful language and expressions. The words chosen in this context can be extremely powerful and possess the power to hurt and inflict very strong emotional responses followed by violent disagreement. Although strong emotions that could cause people to be detrimental are part of our daily life, so far little has been done to investigate how humans use language to cause offense and be impolite. This study investigates how teenagers realize insults as responses to initial insults within different situations with a special focus on gender differences. Who uses more counter-insults throughout and within different situations where social distance is varied? Which realization strategies are used by whom? It will be further inspected whether the target's gender to which the counter-insult is presented, has any effect on the participants' counter-insult behavior.