Everyone loves a new insult

Insult is a social construct. By social I mean, in a given set of people we have a partial order called status or reputation, which assigns different rights to different people on how to conduct themselves in society. Insulting rights mostly come with higher status. We can perhaps rephrase and say that status is simply the right to insult and like status, insult is also sticky.

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Insulting is easy, completely natural and fun in status games. The main use case for insulting is maintaining status. Status of a person in a society is directly proportional to how much and how many can he can insult without facing any consequences. If the target person is offended but keeps quiet, insult becomes a fact. Status Quo. If the target person becomes angry and mad, it still establishes that insult worked. Status in such cases can be negotiated separately through other means including violence.

The number of insults in a language is not static. New insults can be discovered and added to our shard repertoire by random utterances in frustration by random people or by imaginative powers of some creative genius. If greased with push throat broadcast media, it might get quick legitimacy. New and unknown insult is a force majeure. It can tears all defences of reason and uproot any empires of status and prestige. New insult is a cultural phenomenon everyone is waiting for.

Everyone loves a new insult, because almost everyone is below status to someone else in a reputation hierarchy. New insult gives everyone a new weapon to challenge, assert or negotiate status.

New insult is like a breath of new life in a reputation world stifled with stationary status. It momentarily shifts the balance on status and if sticky, could change the rules of the reputation game.

Always remember that insult is an insult because it insults. Fighting an insult is giving legitimacy to it as a valid criteria of judgement. Not fighting it is also accepting it as a valid criteria of judgement. Good insult is a work of art, a public good and almost always useful for everyone.

I have spoken. This is the way.