It's interesting to note that folks seem to to equate someone's use of a racial epithet with being racist. Curiously, this is not necessarily the case. When folks are angry, they tend to use emotive and aggressive language that they feel will yield the "best" results. It is precisely because certain words carry strong emotions that people use them. For example, folks who have had a stroke can find that they have great difficulty speaking, but amazingly are able to use profanities easily. Similarly, one of the characteristics of Tourette syndrome is that profanities are used inappropriately - folks with Tourette rarely shout "Oh heck," "Goodness me," or "Go away."
So when someone gets angry, they can use highly emotive words without that necessarily indicating some deeper-seated attitude. Although the existential reality of someone screaming profanities may be to cause another person to be shocked, offended, angry, or upset, the form of the words used can be irrelevent.
Techinically, it is the difference between using a words
denotation (what a word actually means) and a word's
connotation (what associations a word may have). In the case of profanities, the connotation is a emotional state. When someone gets very angry and calls someone a "b*st*rd," they are not using the literal denotation of the word ("you were born outside of wedlock") but its affective connotation ("Im using a hurtful word that hopefully hurts you.")
People who choose to analyze verbal behavior only at the level of literal meaning are failing to understand the real complexities of language. Calling some an "a**hole" is done not to reflect that the person looks like the someone's rear end but to hurt them emotionally by choosing an emotionally laden word.
Anyone wanting the full one-hour lecture on sociolinguistics and profanity can send me a private message
Suffice to say that although "Kramer" may have gotten angry, we do him a great injustice if we try to read much more into it that that.
Siggy
