To insult is to verbally attack. Aristotle, and with him a whole rhetorical tradition that reaches our days, placed verbal aggression at the opposite pole of rational argumentation, with a strange parallelism between stone and word. "Word and stone have no return", says a popular saying.

Giuseppe Verdi, in his opera Rigoletto, makes the protagonist say, while he follows Sparafucile with his eyes: "We are equal! I with the language and he with the dagger. I am the man who laughs; he, the one who kills!".

Kafka also emphasized this image of the word as a precursor of physical aggression. And, of course, Ortega y Gasset, for whom "the cry is the sonorous preamble to aggression, to combat, to slaughter" (Man and People).

On the other hand, whoever insults or uses ad personam arguments is confessing his own incapacity to ponder: a manifestation of mental weakness, of impaired discernment.

A Spanish politician, a minister himself, during the legislature that is now coming to an end, even dared to defend the need to "naturalize insults". Fortunately, such a rant received the appropriate response from another minister of the same government, but from a different party: "In a democratic society, insults are never justifiable, neither in social networks, nor anywhere else".

Those who watch the spectacle from outside the political scene, that is, the recipients of the electoral message, will always have the wise attitude of Antonio Machado: "A distinguir me paro las voces de los ecos" (To distinguish the voices of the echoes).

To stop to distinguish ideas from outbursts, the nuanced emission, from the visceral shout; reasoning, from the insult to intelligence; the pondered reflection, from the prêt-à-porter topic (adjectives such as sustainable, inclusive, sexist, facha, negationist, progre...), designed in the think tank or laboratory of ideas of the party. And the fact is that the complex social reality does not lend itself to polarized discourses of black or white subject . It offers an immense range of grays.

Victor Klemperer, a survivor of Nazi persecution, advocated the need to discern the discourses in his study on The language in the Third Reich"Resistance to oppression begins by questioning the constant use of buzzwords". And here the quotation of George Orwell's novel 1984 is obligatory.

The scholar and playwright Juan Mayorga, award Princess of Asturias 2022, in a speech on the transcendence of words, said:

"It will never cease to seem like magic that words can do so much. That they can give us so much happiness and do so much harm. That they can threaten a person or make him fall in love, unite a people or divide them, declare war or stop it."

Just as, fortunately, we are increasingly sensitive to environmental pollution, it would be good to be on guard against linguistic pollution, which is contagious and sometimes makes the social climate unbreathable, which can be toxic and destructive for the civil life of society and its institutions.

This is a useful and relevant task for linguists, academics and researchers of Public discourse: to detect and denounce conceptual fallacies, mendacious euphemisms, camouflage words, empty clichés that obscure the semiotic ecosystem of the anthroposphere.