CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Thomas Conley has written an insulting book.
Or, rather, a book about insult – which seems timely in the wake of the recent political campaign season and its 30-second ads.
But rather than bemoaning insults as bad behavior or moral failing, Conley wants people to see them in context, in the complexity of human relations, and wants us to see that we may have lost some of our finer skills at giving and judging offense.
"People take themselves too seriously," according to Conley, a professor emeritus of communication at the University of Illinois, and the author of "Toward a Rhetoric of Insult" (University of Chicago Press).
In an age of political shouting and extremes, when cartoons in one country can result in deadly riots in another part of the world, Conley thinks we've become far too sensitive, too ready to take offense. We need to lighten up, he said.
"I think that gaining an insult appreciation, if you will, allows you to get some distance on this stuff, to stand back and say, 'Oh, look at that, there they go again, same old B.S.,' and so you don't get involved in it," Conley said.
In his book, he examines insult from numerous perspectives, showing how it can be both divisive and unifying, and what it often says about self-identity and "who's on top" in the social order.
"Insults are much more than simply verbal aggression," Conley said. "They're sort of mini dramas, I think, that tell you something about what's going on" – either between the insulter and the person or group being insulted, or between those two and those observing.
His research looks at the practice and variety of insult through the centuries, using examples from Cicero, a Roman politician who was "a master of insult"; from Reformation era pamphlets, both Protestant and Catholic; from Shakespeare ("Thou puking, toad-spotted maltworm"); and from the British comedy troupe Monty Python ("Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"), to name only a few.
The rapper Eminem also gets some attention, as does the African American practice of "doing the dozens," a form of verbal dueling, and there are long lists of insults from various languages, many of them referring to other ethnic groups and nationalities.
In fact, "when it comes to sheer numbers … slurs on ethnicity and nationality seem over the centuries to have topped the charts," Conley writes. He can quote many such slurs from memory, having grown up in Chicago in the late '40s and early '50s, in an ethnic mix of mostly Irish, Italians and Poles.
(One motivation for researching the book, Conley said, was the response he got when asking individual students in a class to anonymously produce their top 10 insulting terms. "I was just amazed at the lack of resourcefulness," he said.)
Probably next on the list of insults over the centuries are derogatory references to women, Conley said.
But despite the lists, one of Conley's key points is that almost no word is always an insult, in every situation. "I can't think of a single term of abuse that is inherently abusive," he said.
One reason is that insults are complex and "radically situational," dependent not only on the context in which they are delivered, and exactly how and to whom, but on shared knowledge and understandings between those giving and receiving, Conley said.
"Fat slob," for instance, is not offensive unless the person hearing it considers that a bad thing to be, he said. The N word can mean one thing in a given group of African Americans and something entirely different and offensive outside it. A firefighter might trade ethnic slurs all day at work as a ritual of social bonding, but start a fight if he heard the same elsewhere.
"Underneath every insult is this basis of agreement," Conley said. Just like with jokes and irony, it takes a lot of shared knowledge to "get it" and also understand the intention, he said.
Insults, in other words, can be offensive, but they can also build intimacy or reinforce social bonds, Conley writes. They can motivate or be a "powerful mode of truth-telling."
"Things, in short, are not as simple as they might seem."