"Fuck Prof Ke lezione di merda". Insultare sui muri dell'università

A corpus of graffiti containing insults photographed in the university premises of the Department of Humanities (Catania) and of La Sapienza (Rome) has been analysed for two different periods: 2007-2010 and 2019. It has thus emerged that the massive spread of social media has drastically reduced the production of all sorts of graffiti. Insults are important clues that allow the reconstruction of the system of values of a sociocultural community. As they are acts that threaten the recipient’s face, insults are placed within the scope of verbal violence in partial overlap with other violent acts, from which they can be differentiated, according to the prototype theory, on the basis of a series of criteria (pragmatic, formal and sequential). In relation to verbal (im)politeness, prototypical insults might be considered inherently impolite acts, whose wording shows a clear tendency towards intensification at various levels. A classification of the conventionalized insults found in the corpus is then proposed, many of which derive from metaphorical processes.