‘Don’t Be Stupid about Intelligent Design’: Confrontational Impoliteness in Medical Journal Editorials

Academics generally clothe their claims in a rhetoric of indirectness and understatement that avoids open disagreement for the sake of the audience’s face. Recent studies, however, have drawn attention to the fact that the more evaluative academic genres, where controversiality is not only tolerated but even desirable, appear to deviate from this model. To shed further light on the subject, the present study analyses the editorials of a leading medical journal that is particularly outspoken in championing medical science against competing knowledge claims. In particular, it explores the deliberate use of impolite wordings in such texts. The results suggest that impoliteness tends to target the Out-group, while in dealing with the In-group, editors are careful to avoid offence even for serious misconduct. The preferred strategies are ridicule and scorn (both instances of negative impoliteness), which account for almost half of relevant realisations, followed by sarcasm. These are all forms of a putdown humour that “achieves solidarity and creates bonds with the metarecipient but expresses hostility to the victim, ousting the latter from the social group” (Dynel 2008: 250). Impoliteness theory thus provides a useful framework for analysing offensive evaluations whose primary purpose is to mark out disciplinary boundaries when these are threatened by the public knowledge claims of outsiders.