i was touched by the similarities this article implied , to bullying ,selecting those to lash out at and a need for kinder side so as to not annihilate everyone. Very informative.
bump!!!

OMG till this very day, i thought my husband was, to good for me, because he is so nice and giving to people, he don't interact with on a daily basis, but ive been with him 15 yrs in January, and he is both verbally and physically abusive to me!! and i thought that it was because of my addiction to alcohol,and that perhaps i deserve it,,and now im sooo confused

Sticks and stones can break spirits for life....bodies heal. very true. thanks for the reminder.

To me verbal abuse is about name calling, intentially hurtful put downs, even control. Yet, not ever shout or frustrated swear word during an arguement qualifies , at least not for me. It's also about the degree of what's said and the pattern.
Verbal abuse is awful, but Joe fact is saying something like "You're too sensative" in and of itself doesn't constitute verbal abuse. Some people might over react to a joke for example and be "Too sensative"

We have a lot of sensitive people here....oops, verbal abuse red light warning

Billy,

Language fascinates me, because except in symbolic logic systems such as math or chess, pinning down the exact and unchanging meanings of words is generally an exercise in futility. The problems arise in communication when we try to specify that truth in verbal terms, and that's owing to what Michael Polanyi called "the poverty of language," by which he meant the inadequacy of words to fully cover all the shades of meaning that the various participants in any conversation bring to it and try to say.

So words that would clearly be abusive in one context can be either totally harmless or even terms of endearment in another. And the harder we try to stabilize, standardize or objectify these meanings, the more elusive, controversial and sometimes oxymoronic they actually become.

Here's my favorite real-life example of a failed attempt to govern or control the meaning of a word, and in this case the word is actually "Christian" itself. In about the 14th century, the French nobility decided that words like "idiot" and "imbecile" were cruel and unnecessarily insulting to one's mentally challenged neighbor. Henceforth, they decreed, the proper way to refer to such a person was to be, "Il est bon Chrtien" or in very rough translation, "He's a good Christian, now leave him alone." Time, usage and some inborn human distaste for enforced politeness eventually changed that, and now in its shortened form, both we and the French just say "cretin."

If I told you that I have a friend who is tiny, no doubt you would imagine a small person. But if I told you I have a friend whose nickname is Tiny, your sense of the oxymoronic would intuitively kick in and you would probably imagine a 300 lb. linebacker who eats whole hams for lunch. If I said of someone that I obviously admire, "He's a gem," you would rightly interpret that I think highly of the fellow. But with a very slight change in my tone of voice, it would be just a clear to you that my real intent was to tell you that I think he's a jerk.

The moral of the story is that language, especially the spoken language rather than written language, is uncontrollable, and today's official, well-mannered Hallmark greeting is tomorrow's biting smackdown-- not in spite of the prohibitions or attempts to stabilize the meaning, but precisely because of these efforts to control.

I really enjoy this post thx.

Nemo has....well his whole post is right-on.

I have noticed in some-longterm marriages...that what I consider abusive...Works like gang-busters for them. Has the wife suffered years of abuse or has that marriage survived? (Gee there's a good religious joke there...but i pass)

Ya I agree with Nemo..great points to ponder

Words can be devastating or motivating...depending on a whole lot of factors.

Sometimes I wonder which is harder to take, though, an outright insult or an insincere compliment? Somewhere in the middle between manipulative flattery and abuse, I believe, is a quality I call mirth, or the ability to knock someone off their pedestal so lovingly and completely that they wind up laughing at themselves. I also believe that this is the laughter of relief, or release from the walls we put up between us and others when we take ourselves too seriously.

IMO, no one had this down to a gentle art form better than did Ogden Nash:

"Sure, deck your limbs in pants;
Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.
You look divine as you advance --
Have you seen yourself retreating?"