perhaps we should work on that section here here's the text which i've started making an effort to clean up although it needs a lot more work oh and the page should probably be all harvard refs rather than none wikipedia usually sticks with the style chosen by the first author instrumental rudeness and pragmatic competence sometimes people deliberately employ rude behaviors to achieve a goal early works in linguistic pragmatism interpreted rudeness as a defective mode of communication however most rudeness serves functional or instrumental purposes in communication and skillfully choosing when and how to be rude may indicate a person's pragmatic competence prior to the mid s most linguistics research ignored the instrumental or 'useful' nature of rudeness in speech brown levinson grice lakoff before then rudeness was seen as a sign of communication failure lakoff gave two rules of pragmatic competence be clear and be polite grice believed that rudeness violated universal norms of conversation of truthfulness politeness and relevancy likewise brown and levinson's politeness framework pp is also based on the idea that politeness is normative and rudeness is eschewed even when engaging in 'face threatening acts' ftas such as making a complaints or refusing a request the semantics and pragmatics of utterances must be taken into account in assessing degree of face redress if the overt content of an utterance is rude for example politeness strategies won t necessarily redeem it brown levinson p robin lakoff addressed what she named 'strategic rudeness ' a style of communication used by prosecutors and therapists to force their interlocutors a courtroom defendant or patient to talk or react in a certain way gabriele kasper gives us the earliest definition of rudeness in an academic paper in her discussion of lakoff's research on strategic rudeness kasper defines rudeness as speech that is constituted by deviation from whatever counts as politic in a given social context is inherently confrontational and disruptive to social equilibrium kasper p this definition is important in that it marks rudeness as speech which is confrontational at its core although kasper further defines rudeness as 'motivated' and 'unmotivated ' her definitions do not make use of natural data it is not until leslie beebe's research comes along in the early to mid s that data on naturally occurring instances of rudeness in everyday conversation is collected drawing from lakoff's idea of strategic rudeness beebe a b similarly proposes the concept of instrumental rudeness rudeness that is meant to achieve a goal like lakoff and kasper beebe believes that rudeness is confrontational behaviour and indeed in her research she found that hostility seemed to pervade the data beebe p in her study of naturally occurring rudeness in new york city beebe provides her own definition of rudeness in this study rudeness is defined as a face threatening act fta or feature of an fta such as intonation which violates a socially sanctioned norm of interaction for the social context in which it occurs it is only rudeness if it receives insufficient redressive action to mitigate its force or of course if it does not occur in a context such as intimacy or emergency that would negate the need for redressive action consequently it causes antagonism discomfort or conflict and results in some disruption to the social harmony the idea that socially sanctioned norms of interaction are violated is central to the perception of rudeness beebe p in this definition beebe asserts that rudeness is an fta or a feature of an fta that has not been mitigated by redressive action and does not occur between intimates or in emergency situations essentially rudeness is a bald on record face attack and not a failed attempt at politeness this definition would also most likely preclude culturally specific ritual insults verbal games or manners of speech that are used among members of certain social groups labov argues that ritual insults or 'sounding ' follow certain linguistic organizational and interactional rules if such speech among members of a cultural in group could be seen as following 'socially sanctioned norms of interaction' as labov argues where there is a low risk of face loss it would most likely not be considered 'rude speech ' according to beebe's definition of rudeness beebe