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Over the past few decades, a new academic discipline has formed under the term “politeness.” “Politeness” intersects with linguistics, sociology, and psychology to explore not only how humans try to be polite, gentle, and nice to each other but, more broadly, how they try to reconcile their distance from each other. On the one hand, humans are quite often driven by desire and try to impose their own ideas and demands on others; on the other, they also try to suppress their own desires by delicately adjusting their distance from others, thereby avoiding conflict and strife. The goal of politeness is to analyze the principles of human behavior concerning such a sense of distance and to visualize them with objective indicators.
 
This book reflects on the academic accumulation surrounding this new field of politeness and aims to theoretically understand impoliteness (swearing, rudeness, and aggression, etc), which seems to be the opposite of politeness, as something based on the same principle. The authors view impoliteness as by no means unrelated to politeness but rather as part of the system of politeness.
 
However, when politeness and impoliteness are examined in tandem, it is clear that there is a considerable difference in the way their effects are manifested. In the words of one of the editors, Masato Takiura, in the preface, “polite words harmonize in a scheduled manner, whereas impolite words are subtly entangled. This is the reason for the difference between the two.”
 
This is also related to the following situation. In modern society, goodwill is traded like money, and people communicate and build trust through the exchange of such goodwill. Goodwill can take the form of politeness, consideration, and gentleness, or the form of more positive action (e.g., love), or be manifested as solidarity with a common enemy. In this sense, politeness tends to be explicit; if it is not the case, it does not work.
 
In contrast, impoliteness does not necessarily have to be explicit to be effective. It often works by being expressed indirectly and non-explicitly. Additionally, as we approach the modern age, people are becoming increasingly wary of explicit expressions of goodwill, owing to their wariness of commercialism, fraud, and hypocrisy, and in this trend, impoliteness has become more trustworthy than politeness. Such a tendency has led to a situation in which the former is a more trustworthy expression of good intentions than the latter.
 
This book attempts to reveal the complex function of impoliteness by examining works of English and Japanese literature as well as the battles of mothers of small children. While coldness and bluntness can sometimes give people a sense of security, politeness, which at first glance appears to be a form of goodwill, can actually annoy them. Based on reading and interpreting materials such as conversations, e-mail exchanges, and literary texts, the authors of this book explore the mechanisms of the interplay between good and bad intentions that we usually experience without thinking about it.
 

(Written by ABE Masahiko, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2023)