Oh yes, both insult and compliment are very contextually dependent. If some enthusiastic but clueless young person said to my mom, "Mrs. L., you're @#%& awesome!", she would blink and smile mechanically and thank them, but it would almost certainly not be the compliment the person intended it to be--no matter which "cuss word" had filled in the @#%&.
And part of the compliment/insult/neither question is explicitly dependent on what is valued, of course. When I was in school, my mom was just sure that I needed to change my clothes--even if it was just to other clothes of similar formality--when going out to a party or a date or a group activity after school, to demonstrate to the people I was going with that I valued their company and would think about what I was wearing for it. But to my cohort, trying too hard was possibly the cardinal sin--unless it was for something of a wildly different level of formality (putting on comfortable clothes after a debate tournament or changing out of jeans for the homecoming dance), changing clothes meant you'd spilled something on your previous clothes. It was not valued and not a sign of valuing others--people would have been baffled to think of it that way.
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Date: 2013-06-26 05:21 pm (UTC)And part of the compliment/insult/neither question is explicitly dependent on what is valued, of course. When I was in school, my mom was just sure that I needed to change my clothes--even if it was just to other clothes of similar formality--when going out to a party or a date or a group activity after school, to demonstrate to the people I was going with that I valued their company and would think about what I was wearing for it. But to my cohort, trying too hard was possibly the cardinal sin--unless it was for something of a wildly different level of formality (putting on comfortable clothes after a debate tournament or changing out of jeans for the homecoming dance), changing clothes meant you'd spilled something on your previous clothes. It was not valued and not a sign of valuing others--people would have been baffled to think of it that way.