ABOMINATIO  當面罵人法

ADDRESS designed to insult one's addressee.

Insulting form of address, direct insult to the face.

Contrast EXECRATIO, which is not face-to-face.

Greek: bdelygmia (rarely used)

Hypernym
  • ADDRESSSPEECH ACT of explicitly addressing an audience.
    • SPEECH ACTRHETORICAL TROPE in the form of a deliberate rhetorico-semantic act performed. [This definition is still a tentative stop-gap, and this category is far larger than I would like. It needs to be intelligently subdivided. CH]
      • RHETORICAL TROPE體裁詞格　RHETORICAL DEVICE mainly concerned with the structural semantics of expressions.
Greek/Latin: The phenomenon is common indeed, but the term ABOMINATIO is not attested in classical Latin.

Ancient Chinese: Quite rare. Playful insult is represented notably in ZHUANG and predictable in certain contexts in ZUO, but even there only sporadically, unlike in the much later SANGUOYANYI where it becomes an inance routine. There is an isolated case in LY. Most insulting remarks in LY are not face to face.

Compare accusatio, execratio, bdelugmia.

NB: This mode ritualises the direct confrontational public display of anything from temporary irritation to deep ideological disagreement. Through such open confrontational conflict a public sphere of presumed Greek parrheesia "frankness" is established. Compare the classical Chinese notion of zhi2 直 "straightforwardness in utterance" which involves directness of political public utterance, but which rarely involves what we would want to call abominatio "the spontaneous insult". For the cultural importance of public insult, see the journal Mal3edicta.

    Rhetorical device locations: 3
    • 韓非子 役夫！

      Note the direct address with 汝 in the next line.

    • 論語 「野哉， 由也
    • 論語 11.18　柴也愚， 參也魯 師也辟 由也喭