Fragile men and fishy arguments: Attributing and disputing offence in online interaction

What happens when someone tells you that you are offended, even though you do not feel offended yourself? Contested attributions of offence provide an interesting testing ground for how one’s feelings of offence can diverge from how offence is displayed in interaction. In this paper, we consider the phenomenon of attributions of offence to ask on what grounds a speaker can be labelled as offended, even when the speaker does not claim any feelings of offence, as well as to what extent a speaker can deny being offended, when appearing to, indeed, be offended. We present a case study of an interaction from Twitter (X) stemming from an instance of failed humour, exploring the linguistic cues that people rely on when judging others to be offended. We find that disputes regarding offence are not actually necessarily to do with one’s feelings at all but instead relate to whether someone's emotional involvement is perceived to be a barrier to their objectivity and argumentative strength.