Fighting words are written or spoken words, generally expressed to incite hatred or violence from their target. Specific definitions, freedoms, and limitations of fighting words vary by jurisdiction. It is also used in a general sense of words that when uttered tend to create (deliberately or not) a verbal or physical confrontation by their mere usage.
Read more about Fighting Words: Canada, United States, Incitement Vs. Fighting Words
Famous quotes containing the words fighting and/or words:
“Soldier or sailor, the fighting man is but a fiend; and the staff and body-guard of the Devil musters many a baton.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)