I did end up thinking about whether it’s always easy to be self-aware about the fact that you box other people.
You walk on the street and a passer by seem agitated and says “come at me bro”. Thinking it as play or in general just wanting to went rage from your daily stresses you approach and punch the person. They feel sore about the situation and later decide to chare you with assault. You plead that the situation was mutual understanding informal boxing match. It’s not a super strong defence but it’s not to my mind automaticallly failing one. In judging such a case there might be multiple interpretation questions. Is the idiom regularly known enough that it establishes a code of conduct? Is it reasonable to hear as a non-idiom. If heard as a non-idiom, does “bro” indicate playfulness? If a conduct, does it amount to consenting to be punched? Or does the conduct invite someone to be a first aggressor, merely amounting to guarantee a retaliation and that the sayer won’t first strike? Even if at the time of events the participants don’t think in the terms of a boxing match it’s different from an unannouced strike out of the blue.
I did end up thinking about whether it’s always easy to be self-aware about the fact that you box other people.
You walk on the street and a passer by seem agitated and says “come at me bro”. Thinking it as play or in general just wanting to went rage from your daily stresses you approach and punch the person. They feel sore about the situation and later decide to chare you with assault. You plead that the situation was mutual understanding informal boxing match. It’s not a super strong defence but it’s not to my mind automaticallly failing one. In judging such a case there might be multiple interpretation questions. Is the idiom regularly known enough that it establishes a code of conduct? Is it reasonable to hear as a non-idiom. If heard as a non-idiom, does “bro” indicate playfulness? If a conduct, does it amount to consenting to be punched? Or does the conduct invite someone to be a first aggressor, merely amounting to guarantee a retaliation and that the sayer won’t first strike? Even if at the time of events the participants don’t think in the terms of a boxing match it’s different from an unannouced strike out of the blue.
In your example it’s quite clear that boxing happened. Whether or not it was justified play or wasn’t is another question.