Utility
Sometimes, people deliberately employ rude behaviors to achieve a goal. Early works in linguistic pragmatism interpreted rudeness as a defective mode of communication. However, most rudeness serves functional or instrumental purposes in communication, and skillfully choosing when and how to be rude may indicate a person's pragmatic competence.
Robin Lakoff (1989) addressed what she named 'strategic rudeness,' a style of communication used by prosecutors and therapists to force their interlocutors (a courtroom defendant or patient) to talk or react in a certain way. Rudeness in everyday speech "is frequently instrumental, and is not merely pragmatic failure" (Beebe, 1995, p. 154). Most rude speakers are attempting to accomplish one of two important instrumental functions: to vent negative feelings, and/or to get power (Beebe, 1995, p. 159).
Read more about this topic: Rudeness
Other articles related to "utility":
... Cambridge economist Joan Robinson famously criticized utility for being a circular concept "Utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them ... Another criticism comes from the assertion that neither cardinal nor ordinary utility is empirically observable in the real world ... In the case of cardinal utility it is impossible to measure the level of satisfaction "quantitatively" when someone consumes or purchases an apple ...
... argued that some of the implications of the Friedman–Savage utility function were paradoxical ... His solution was to relate the curvature of an individual's utility function to increases in wealth ... determining an individual's "normal" level of income, controlling for utility gains from "recreational investments" (The psychological utility gained by the act of gambling), and measuring deviations from the ...
... Homology models can also be used to identify subtle differences between related proteins that have not all been solved structurally ... For example, the method was used to identify cation binding sites on the Na+/K+ ATPase and to propose hypotheses about different ATPases' binding affinity ...
155mm gun based on a M4 Sherman chassis (Israel Cold War) Land Rover Wolf (Main utility vehicle of the British Army) Landwirtschäftlicher Schlepper (co ...
... to cover about 60% of operating costs of the city’s utility in 2004 maintenance has, as a result, been minimal ... In the past, the Delhi utility has relied heavily on government financial support for recurrent and capital expenditures in the magnitude of 3 billion (US$54.9 million) per year and ... been passed on as loans by the Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, the utility’s balance sheet is loaded with a huge debt totalling about 50 billion (US$915.0 million) that ...
Famous quotes containing the word utility:
“Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)