I agree that in common parlance there is still some ontological confusion going on here, but I think it’s largely a sideshow to what is happening.
If there was a culture in the world that had an expression that more straightforwardly meant “I curse you” and so wasn’t making claims about checkable attributes about the other person, largely not that much would change. Indeed, “I curse you”, or the more common “fuck you” is a thing people do (or in the former case used to do), and it works, and usually has very similar effects to saying “you suck”, despite the latter being ontologically a very different kind of statement if taken literally.
I agree that there is often also a claim smuggled in about some third-party checkable attribute. This is IMO not that crazy. Indeed, a curse/direct-insult is often associated with some checkable facts, and so calling attention to both makes it efficient to combine them.
It is indeed common that if you were wronged by someone by your own lights, that this is evidence that other people will be wronged by their lights as well, and so that there will be some third-party checkable attribute of the person that generalizes. So it’s not that surprising that these two kinds of actions end up with shared language (and my guess is there are also benefits in terms of plausible deniability on how much social capital you end up spending that encourage people to conflate here, but this doesn’t change the fact that the pure curse kind of expression exists and is a crucial thing to model to make accurate predictions here).
I agree that in common parlance there is still some ontological confusion going on here, but I think it’s largely a sideshow to what is happening.
If there was a culture in the world that had an expression that more straightforwardly meant “I curse you” and so wasn’t making claims about checkable attributes about the other person, largely not that much would change. Indeed, “I curse you”, or the more common “fuck you” is a thing people do (or in the former case used to do), and it works, and usually has very similar effects to saying “you suck”, despite the latter being ontologically a very different kind of statement if taken literally.
I agree that there is often also a claim smuggled in about some third-party checkable attribute. This is IMO not that crazy. Indeed, a curse/direct-insult is often associated with some checkable facts, and so calling attention to both makes it efficient to combine them.
It is indeed common that if you were wronged by someone by your own lights, that this is evidence that other people will be wronged by their lights as well, and so that there will be some third-party checkable attribute of the person that generalizes. So it’s not that surprising that these two kinds of actions end up with shared language (and my guess is there are also benefits in terms of plausible deniability on how much social capital you end up spending that encourage people to conflate here, but this doesn’t change the fact that the pure curse kind of expression exists and is a crucial thing to model to make accurate predictions here).