On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 06:56:16PM +0100, Stefano Stabellini wrote: > Abuse is never justified, I hope that's clear for everybody. Depends on details of your definition of abuse. > So we are down to the definition of verbal abuse. > The Oxford dictionary gives me: > > "speak to (someone) in an insulting and offensive way" Insufficient details to tell if the statement above is correct. Insulting and offensive to *whom*? I have seen people making completely revolting statements about e.g. females in general and get extremely insulted when said statements had been described as sexist, no matter how neutral had description been. I have seen people deeply insulted by being told (in absolutely neutral expressions) that recipe they had offered for some task will not do what they said it would, when the simple experiment (reproduced by a lot of people present) would have clearly demonstrated just that. The same people tend to get _really_ insulted when somebody reports the result of said experiment. And anybody who'd been on the net for a year (hell, a month would suffice) can bring a lot more interesting cases... BTW, is it an abuse to describe somebody as a demagogue? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html