This schoolyard rhyme projects an invulnerability to verbal insults that sounds good
but rings false. Indeed, the need for such a verse belies its own claims. For most
of us, feeling insulted is a distressing.and distressingly common.experience.

In Sticks and Stones, philosopher Jerome Neu probes the nature, purpose, and effects
of insults, exploring how and why they humiliate, embarrass, infuriate, and wound us
so deeply. What kind of injury is an insult? Is it determined by the insulter or the
insulted? What does it reveal about the character of both parties as well as the
character of society and its conventions? What role does insult play in social and
legal life? When is telling the truth an insult? Neu draws upon a wealth of examples
and anecdotes.as well as a range of views from Aristotle and Oliver Wendell Holmes
to Oscar Wilde, John Wayne, Katherine Hepburn, and many others.to provide surprising
answers to these questions. He shows that what we find insulting can reveal much
about our ideas of character, honor, gender, the nature of speech acts, and social
and legal conventions. He considers how insults, both intentional and unintentional,
make themselves felt.in play, Freudian slips, insult humor, rituals, blasphemy, libel,
slander, and hate speech. And he investigates the insult's extraordinary power, why
it can so quickly destabilize our sense of self and threaten our moral identity, the
very center of our self-respect and self-esteem.

Entertaining, humorous, and deeply insightful, Sticks and Stones unpacks the
fascinating dynamics of a phenomenon more often painfully experienced than clearly
understood.

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