Sometimes , researchers use different terms but they mean the same thing.Do you think, in this respect, that rudeness implies impoliteness or is it the other way round?Alternatively , do you think that they are two faces of the same coin?
One can be rude while observing all the forms of politeness, and one can be impolite (unintentionally or out of ignorance) without being rude. Rudeness seems to require deliberateness or willfulness in a way that impoliteness doesn't.
One can be rude while observing all the forms of politeness, and one can be impolite (unintentionally or out of ignorance) without being rude. Rudeness seems to require deliberateness or willfulness in a way that impoliteness doesn't.
They have something in common. However, to be rude is a rough impression but the person may still seem polite in many ways. The rude is impolite in some form only. To be impolite is simply not to be decent in some cases while it does not imply to be absolutely impolite in all forms.
The connotation of being unfinished or unrefined doesn’t quite work for some forms of impolite or rude verbal riposte; for example, the sarcastic wit of an Oscar Wilde or H.L. Mencken. The words rude (and crude) and impolite have a long and varied but sometimes intertwined history and are used with various connotations and senses in various contexts (I distinguish connotation from denotation in the classical way, and regard a sense as merely the marking of a distinction that may often but not always be made, whether implicitly or explicitly). However, whereas some dictionaries characterize rude (in one sense) as offensively impolite, I have yet to see the converse. And in many contexts (not always, not without exception) characterizing someone as acting offensively connotes blameworthiness which in turn connotes something that a person is responsible for, usually intentional or willful behavior. So, I maintain that in many contexts attributing rudeness is less exculpatory than attributing impoliteness.
- https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/connotation-denotation/
- https://www.dictionary.com/e/denotation-and-connotation/
Lots of thanks to all colleagues who contributed a lot to the issue through their scholarly answers.
Michael Uebel I mean, I have not seen impolite characterized as offensively rude. (I agree that expressions like "the converse of", "the reverse of", and "the contrary" can be ambiguous in such contexts and I should have been more precise.)
Mencken was loved by some and hated by others. His contemporary Alfred Knopf remarked, "He had the reputation ... of being a burly, loud, raucous fellow, rough in his speech and lacking refined manners." (Although Knopf himself came to disagree with this characterization of Mencken.) As for Wilde, Ambrose Beirce mentions "rude but robust mental activities." Not much perhaps, but where there's smoke there's fire, and the prim well-mannered churchgoing bourgeois public were more likely to regard these guys as rude and impolite than intellectuals. But hey, why the concern over "reception history"? Are you saying that you, as a native speaker of English, regard it as infelicitous to ever regard some cases of sarcasm as rude or impolite? Can't it ever be impolite or rude to be sarcastic? That's all my point requires.
As for my chain of connotations being idiosyncratic, well, that's the pot calling the kettle black. Just compare your simplistic "Rude means unwrought, uncultivated....Impolite is another word from Latin, this time meaning unpolished...They both connote the unfinished, the unrefined" with the detailed histories of rude, crude, and impolite in the unabridged OED.
Michael Uebel
BTW, dictionary•com gives its first sense of rude as "discourteous or impolite, especially in a deliberate way" [my emphasis], which is the very claim I made in my first post that you took issue with:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/rude
The bourgeois public in Wilde's and Mencken's day were certainly reading newspapers and occasionally attending public lectures, even if they didn't fork out for the books.
You say: "Genuine* linguistic sarcasm is refined....sarcasm is never rude." Then how am I to take your remark on my typo?
__________
* Persuasive definition alert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_definition
Semantically speaking, the two terms have an overlapping distribution. The reason is that impoliteness refers to the crudeness and gaucheness in a manner that is vulgar and discourteous , especially in a deliberate way. Therefore, rudeness is a hyponym representing only one of the many manifestations of impoliteness which is a hypernym.
Reza Biria We do say that one can be rude by being "offensively impolite" (Mac Dashboard Dictionary), which makes rudeness the hyponym as you claim. Also, my previous remark that "I have not seen impolite characterized as offensively rude" is consistent with your claim. Yet, I think the subordination relation between impoliteness and rudeness is context-sensitive and can go either way because of differing connotations and uses to draw distinctions the terms might have in various contexts. What I have in mind is that sometimes we may explain someone's rudeness in terms of their impoliteness and sometimes we may explain their impoliteness in terms of their rudeness; the contextual nuances and connotations will play a role. Also, might there not be situations where rudeness and impoliteness are treated as non-overlapping? (E.g. can't one be considered rude for strictly observing conventions of politeness or unintentionally impolite without being considered rude?)
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