Which is worse, to be obnoxious or to be a jerk?
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, October 27th, 2004 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Random bits.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 27th, 2004 at 3:58 pm
Hm… I’m not sure I understand the question. I know it’s possible to be obnoxious without being a jerk, but is it possible to be a jerk (in the contemporary sense of the word) without being obnoxious?
October 27th, 2004 at 4:09 pm
Well, my feeling was that jerk was a personality trait, while obnoxious was how you acted in one particular situation. A friend feels that jerk is how you act to one person, while obnoxious is a personality trait. My mother agrees with me, my father with this friend.
It came up because on the phone the other day I called my father a jerk, and he called me obnoxious, and I said that being a jerk was worse, while he said the reverse. Then my mother agreed with me, so he called me a jerk, too, and — well, anyways, the story is clearly boring, but now I’m asking random people about it because I want to be right.
October 27th, 2004 at 5:27 pm
Well, I don’t think either obnoxious or jerk inherently refers to a personality trait by itself; it’s all in the tense and aspect stuff you put on top of it:
1. He’s a jerk. (=personality trait)
2. He’s obnoxious. (=personality trait)
3. He’s being a jerk. (=on a particular occasion)
4. He’s being obnoxious. (=on a particular occasion)
I think I agree with your intuition that a jerk is a worse thing to be, though. For me, there are no non-obnoxious jerks, but there are ways of being obnoxious that do not involve being a jerk, and at least some of these are less obnoxious than the ways that do involve being a jerk.
October 27th, 2004 at 5:54 pm
The answer to any “what is worse” question is — Geroge Bush.
October 27th, 2004 at 6:12 pm
ha-ha, I like that, Harrison, that it’s to be George Bush than either being obnoxious or a jerk. (It could be understood that way.)
I would say being a jerk is always worse. That has to do with ethics, morals - while being obnoxious is only sort of a behavioral aesthetic (or anti-asthetic) as in, it’s annoying.
October 27th, 2004 at 9:25 pm
QP, bringing in tense and aspect are unfair: you can coerce individual-level predicates into stage-level ones (or vice versa) that way. Just because I can say “You’re acting very British today” doesn’t mean that British isn’t individual-level. I get the impression that generally, jerk is more IL while obnoxious more SL (where presumable SL of a negative trait is better, while IL of a positive one is, though this latter might be arguable).
But hey — Harrison aside — the more people who agree with me the better.
October 29th, 2004 at 5:24 pm
I think my default reading of jerk and obnoxious is that they’re both individual-level predicates, although I find it difficult to be sure about this. But when you ask a question like “Is it worse to be a jerk, or is it worse to be obnoxious?” or “Which is worse, being a jerk or being obnoxious?” the non-finite forms don’t tell me whether a stage-level or an individual-level reading is intended, but the coordinate structure strongly suggests that I ought to interpret them as two instances of the same kind of predicate.
October 30th, 2004 at 12:19 am
I think that if someone said “he’s a jerk” or “she’s obnoxious”, I’d take jerk to be individual(lier) and obnoxious to be stage(ier), because I think that context is fairly IL/SL neutral. I’m not entirely sure, and they can easily both be either, so it’s not a huge difference: I think I just keep repeating it because it’s the only intuition I have.
I do agree that the coordinate structure suggests a parallel interpretation, but I think that doesn’t necessarily require them to both be IL/SL — I can easily ask “Is it worse to be ugly or drunk?” and ugly stays IL and drunk SL.
What I really want to know is why, when I HATED this topic when I worked on something that ended up being about it, it still comes up once a month in totally random contexts. Oh well — at least thetic/categorical haven’t come up.