THE LINGUISTICS OF POLITE MOCKERY AND SWEET INSULTS: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF 50 ENGLISH IDIOMS

Abstract

In our daily lives, we interact with a variety of people in different settings—family members, friends, colleagues, students, or customers. There are occasions when we wish to express disagreement or frustration but cannot do so directly, and instead resort to indirect, sugar-coated expressions, idioms, and witty sarcasm. While some may argue that sarcasm signals weakness, others consider it a sign of intellect; as Oscar Wilde famously wrote, “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence.” This study investigates fifty commonly used sarcastic idioms and expressions in English to examine their pragmatic functions, face-management strategies, and reliance on conversational implicature. Employing a qualitative descriptive approach, the analysis is grounded in Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Theory, showing how speakers strategically flout conversational maxims and perform off-record face-threatening acts. Findings reveal that sarcasm is a cognitively and socially sophisticated discourse strategy, enabling speakers to express criticism, maintain social harmony, and demonstrate linguistic creativity. The study contributes to the understanding of sarcasm as a pragmatic, context-dependent, and socially regulated phenomenon, with implications for sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and applied linguistics.