Basic Trope: Character gets offended by a word they don't know.
- Straight: Alice praises Bob, calling him a "paragon of his field". Bob is offended as he thinks it means he does bad.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice lavishes Bob with praise, but Bob is very offended as he doesn't know the meaning of any of the words.
- Alice uses the word "oxymoron" within earshot of Bob, and he yells at her for calling him a "moron", even though she wasn't even talking about him.
- Downplayed: Bob says "What does that mean?" while getting angry.
- Justified:
- Alice is a Jive Turkey and Bob is Literal-Minded.
- Bob is new to Alice's culture.
- The word uses verbiage that society no longer agrees with, and thus people would find insulting even in context.
- Inverted:
- Alice calls Bob an "ignoramus", which he doesn't know the meaning of and takes it as a compliment.
- Alice calls Bob a "pig". Bob knows that pigs are actually kind, smart, sensitive, energetic and clean, so he says "Thanks".
- Subverted: Bob was just playing dumb.
- Double Subverted: But then he calls Alice "stupendous", and she takes offence because she thinks it means "stupid".
- Parodied:
- Alice compliments a whole group of people with a word that everyone interprets in their own way, all of them being offended.
- Bob explodes when he hears Alice say regular words, but when she actually does insult him, he doesn't react all that much.
- Averted: Bob always knows what Alice is trying to say.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice rapid-fires a speech at Bob that includes both overly-verbose terms that Bob understands and others that require additional explanation to make clear are not insults, and Layman's Terms that swing between understandable and "Bob thinks Alice believes he is an idiot and is dumbing the facts down for him", with the occasional divergence into Buffy Speak that Bob needs a few seconds to make heads or tails out of and really does not knows what that says about his own intelligence or Alice's.
- Enforced: To set Bob up as Literal-Minded while throwing in some comedy.
- Lampshaded: "He didn't even know what 'paragon' meant?"
- Invoked: Alice is both mad at Bob and proud of him and wants to compliment and insult Bob at the same time, so she chooses a remark that can be taken as both.
- Exploited: Carol learns some new words and phrases from Alice and Bob having this all the time.
- Defied: Bob carries a dictionary around with him.
- Discussed: As a response to the above Lampshaded, Carol says "Hey, go easy on him," and they have a conversation about words and language.
- Conversed: "That Bob character took 'paragon' a bit too literally, eh!"
- Implied: Bob is seen looking shocked after Alice calls him a "paragon".
- Played for Laughs: Alice uses a bunch of long words to describe Bob and Bob calls I Take Offense to That Last One, which is ironically a "nice" word ("He's a magnificent individual." "Hey! I took a bath five minutes ago!").
- Played for Drama: Alice and Bob are best friends or dating and this leads to a Feud Episode.
- Played for Horror: Bob decides being called as "having elephantiasis on his ego" is an insult worth pummeling Alice into a coma, if not something much worse.
- Deconstructed: Starting a feud literally over a fancy word paints Bob as a thin-skinned (in every literal sense of the word) brute.
- Reconstructed: Alice was being insulting. Either she actually thought that the fancy word she said was a Flowery Insult and Bob caught on to her intent or the fancy word she said was insulting in the context of the situation where she said it (why else would she take so much time making clear that she's making spaghetti ala puttanesca while everybody else is treating Bob as a man-whore?).
Are you Calling Me a Logarithm? This Is Unforgivable!
