more on "Monday"

[Amy West]

On 7/24/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>> (There's a philosophical question here: if someone calls you a name and
>> >you*don't know*  that it's derogatory, are you still insulted? Or the
>> >inverse: if you use a term ignorantly and*don't know*  that it's
>> >insulting, are you guilty of "hate speech"?)
>> >
> An interesting theoretical issue, and one that came up in the early days of speech act theory.  J. L. Austin, in his lectures* that turned into_How to do things with words_, discussed the issue of whether "insult" is, in his terminology, an illocutionary verb (one that is characterized by speaker's intentions, like "promise") or a perlocutionary one (characterized by its effect on the hearer, like "alert").  He put it in both categories, like "tempt" and "warn" ("I warned you, but you didn't listen" vs. "I tried to warn you, but you didn't listen").  So the cop could have been said to insult Crawford on the illocutionary sense or he could have been said to have tried but failed to insult him on the perlocutionary sense, if Crawford (like most of the rest of us before this thread) had no idea what a Monday was.
My point is probably moot: I believe in the coverage the off-duty
admitted using it as a general insult, but not a specifically racial
one, so the intent was there to insult but not on a "hate speech" basis.
And note that the ball player *knew* the racial insult sense, which the
cop says he didn't. So I guess the philosophical question comes down to
Is the off-duty cop being a jerk or a bigoted jerk on his own time?

---Amy West

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