The Creativity of Abuse

While greetings, terms of address, jocular abuse, and other ritualised verbal exchanges, reflect and help interpret social changes, they also contain within themselves an independent dynamic. This consists of a constant alternation of fixed and variant forms and thereby throws up the opportunities for social comment and criticism. Exchanges of ritual and jocular abuse involve most linguistic awareness and, while retaining a formulaic shape, provide the most creative examples of semantic experimentation and social comment. The folk contrast between 'serious' politeness formulae and 'game-like' ritual insults reflects, at a meta-level, that within each kind of exchange between the use of 'proper' and 'improper' forms. The contrast more generally reflects the predictable and innovative aspects of language use. Terms of address, greetings, farewells, and the verbal exchanges contained in joking and insult relationships have a dual character. On the one hand, they can reinforce assumptions about the relative status and hierarchy of the speakers and listeners and so perpetuate the wider status quo (Evans-Pritchard I964: 22I; Firth I972: 7; Mitchell-Kernan Sharman I969: II5). This is to emphasise their fixed, enduring character. But they are also among those critical areas of language use which, simply because they are 'ritualised' (or at least conventional enough to trigger predictable responses), contain the potential for the starkest possible contrasts of meaning. The assumption of predictability makes the genuine element of surprise more dramatic. The recipient may well interpret such 'deviance' as abusive but is, for that reason, forced to re-consider the basis of the relationship. This potential for contrastive meaning and subsequent re-definition of relationships is clearly evident in the use of pronominal and other address terms, on which much work has been done.