Boob.
Minnow.
Skank.
Told you. He just doesn’t give up!
Oooh, skank. I wish I were fun enough to deserve that.
This is exhausting. I need a coffee break.
And before you ask: No. I concede nothing. 
Geez louise ,no wonder the pub in deserted these days.
RORY
Was that one? 
I think so.
True story: A friend of mine, actually a mentor in graduate school was in a meeting at a user facility. Basically, a bunch of people getting together to see who gets to run experiments in the next quarter. He’s from Dublin, graduate school in the US, and at that time was a postdoc at a university in Wales trying to get time at a facility in England. He and a guy from an English university were fighting over access on one beamline, and the English guy says “You Americans are all so self-important.”
My buddy replies, “I’m not American, I’m Irish!”
His boss elbowed him and said, “You’re not helping.”
What are the circumstances? I dunno about others, but your question is meaningless to me unless there are circumstances.
Bully!
No circumstances as such, but do you think there could be circumstances where it would be reasonable to retaliate aggressively ?
It just seems to me that if people understood the nature of verbal insults and applied reason to their reactions ,half the sh1t that goes on in this world wouldn’t happen. I think it would be a great benefit to young people to teach some kind of personal development/ non-religious spirituality in schools that would in part cover that kind of thing,as well as other life skills.
RORY
Hear resoundingly hear!
What would do it? Meditation, do you think? Mindfulness? A return to the old virtue of “turning the other cheek”?
I do think one of the issues about offence being given and taken is the almost implied threat when one party deliberately insults another. There’s a sort of “If you react aggressively, I’ll … [do whatever]” about it. But what if I could learn not to react? Would that protect me? Or mark me out as a potential victim and so increase my risk? I don’t know the answers to these questions …
There used to be an old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.” It hardly served as a substantial teaching, because while anyone can see there’s a certain truth to it, I was always left to wonder why I wound up feeling hurt by others’ words anyway.
The fact is, words DO matter. People CAN be hurt by the things people say. People SHOULD watch their mouths because of this. This has nothing to do with the bugbear of “political correctness” that is so fashionable to sneer at these days. What it has to do with instead is simple, common decency. There’s a difference, and only the lazy or the willfully monstrous deny it. Decency is what keeps a society together, not mutual predation. Otherwise, why even use the word “society”?
But how do we learn decency? I say it’s at home. But I also agree with Rory that the time might be ripe for a broader cultural self-examination, and this is where schools can also be of use. Normally I would hesitate to blindly support letting schools take this on, but if home isn’t enough to foster decency, then maybe that’s the way to go. But how to make it stick? Peer pressure. But until everybody’s had it up to here with barbarity, that might be a tall order.
But in some circumstances, for some, maybe not enough.
Which I think is a situation where the logic of the OP is insufficient.
[I somehow crossed with Nanos’s last post]
Certain schools of thought mark a difference between pacifism and nonviolence: crudely put, the former is being a doormat at all costs; the latter is a goal with room for lapses. Knowing the difference between mere words, and actual imminent danger, counts. If I get taunted by everyone because I wear a shoe on my head, I have choices: stop wearing it, ignore the taunts, or go somewhere else and hope that works. Lashing out, physically or otherwise, against the taunts is taking a bad road. But if someone’s going to clock me for wearing the shoe, so long as I’m not doing so to provoke a reaction then I think I have a right to protect myself, which sometimes may take only a word, and no need for physicality; or maybe it does take physical action which of course is cause for regret, but so long as it’s not taken to extremes, this can be excused. The ideal, and the hard part, is to protect myself without anger. That’s not something we normally think of.
Naturally, but you have to start somewhere. So long as the intent is there, improvement is always available.
If I hadn’t crossed I would have picked up from the “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.” instead. It was current when I was a kid in the context of cruel things said by kids in the playground that were probably a form of bullying. I think I understood the sticks and stones to be metaphorical. And I heard it both from adults in the sense of ‘just ignore it’ and also thrown back at a verbal abuser.
Isn’t is still current?
The saying is empirically false. Studies show that childhood bullying, verbal or physical, does lasting psychological damage, significantly increasing the risks of suicide, depression, addictions and poverty. It shortens lifespans and affects behaviour decades into adulthood.
https://www.livescience.com/53034-childhood-bullying-lasting-mental-health-effects.html
Bullying can have a lasting effect on a person’s mental health: A new study finds that children who were bullied frequently when they were 8 years old were more likely to develop a psychiatric disorder that needed treatment as an adult, compared with kids who were not bullied.
The scientists also found strong evidence that being bullied as a child puts kids at high risk for depression as a young adult, according to the study, published online today (Dec. 9) in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
The findings suggest that being victimized by bullying in early childhood increases the risk of depressive disorders that need psychiatric treatment later in life, said study author Dr. Andre Sourander, a professor of child psychiatry at the University of Turku in Finland.
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-23756749
Bullying in childhood “throws a long shadow” into victims’ adult lives, suggests research indicating long-term negative consequences for health, job prospects and relationships.
The study tracked more than 1,400 people between the ages of nine and 26.
School bullies were also more likely to grow up into adult criminals.
The study, from Warwick University in the UK and Duke University in the US, concludes bullying should not be seen as “a harmless rite of passage”.…
We cannot continue to dismiss bullying as a harmless, almost inevitable, part of growing up. We need to change this mindset and acknowledge this as a serious problem
Dieter Wolke, University of Warwick
All of those involved in bullying, as victims or aggressors, had outcomes that were generally worse than the average for those who had not been involved in bullying.
Sustained bullying of all kinds is violence. Teachers & parents who ponder the above and decide that if there aren’t too many bruises nobody got hurt - which is usually the easiest option - are betraying the kids they’re supposed to protect.
No idea. I assume it’s been lost, having encountered Millennials who don’t know who Grace Slick is, or how to read an analog clock. Sic transit gloria mundi.
I’ve always said as much. Even unsustained it qualifies, IMO.
It’s no longer uncontested, but it’s still the majority attitude. Bullying is a difficult issue for adult authority to deal with. It’s difficult to determine the truth; the bullies are often the popular kids with large cliques of supporting witnesses, and the victims are usually isolated kids trapped in the omerta of childhood, who have learned that complaint does no good and exposes them to later retaliation. What overworked teacher with 30 other kids to attend to wants to jump into that rat’s nest? It’s easier to ignore it, and the saying provides a false but convenient ‘common sense’ excuse for doing so.
So I think we could agree that calling someone a lazy drunk is bullying.
One might then ask if it matters that the shoe fits.