![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) simont |
Mon 2003-06-09 05:54 |
Difficult question. Hmm.
I think incompetence is a very general term: you can be incompetent at practically anything, including both mental and physical skills. Clumsiness is a specific subclass of incompetence, namely being incompetent at the everyday physical skills that most people don't need to practice (such as opening and closing doors, holding a stationary item in your hand without dropping it, walking on a flat surface without tripping over).
"Duhbrain" I'm reserving here for particularly impressive forms of incompetence, in this case managing a failure mode that I would previously have assumed wasn't even possible. I might also apply it in other different sorts of extreme cases too; it's a word I'll only resort to when I don't think any of the ones I normally use carry enough weight. (Hence, it's only extreme because I'm saying it and it's so far out of character for my normal vocabulary. From a 12-year-old schoolboy it's probably a very mild insult and he'd have to think of something better if he wanted more emphasis.)
Why are we discussing the linguistics of insults in depth, incidentally? I mean, not that it isn't kinda fun, but it's not something I'd have expected to be asked out of the blue :-) |
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