Mockery is known as mockery that is carried out with the aim of vilifying, shaming or humiliating someone . The etymological root of the term is found in the Germanic word skernjan .
For example: “Businessmen who take advantage of an emergency situation to raise prices deserve ridicule,” “When the news broke, the president of the club was exposed to public ridicule,” “Bullying is a ridicule that we must banish.” of all educational establishments.”
Mockery is characterized by aggressiveness , even if it is symbolic. Its purpose is to cause an affront to the recipient, making them look ridiculous or in a negative position on a social level.
One of the intentions of ridicule, therefore, is to damage the public image . In this sense, ridicule often seeks to be instructive : for the affected person, who will not want to go through the same thing again; and for other people, who will not want to be in that situation.
Suppose an experienced footballer claims money owed to him by his club. The president of the institution, disgusted with this claim, decides to make fun of him and sends the professional to train with the lower divisions (the quarry). He also publicly states that the athlete will return to the professional team when he is “more mature” and knows how to “understand reality.” With this measure, the leader punishes the person who made the claim and shows the rest of the footballers what will happen to them if they complain about the working conditions.
If we refer to a thesaurus, we find many terms that can be used instead of derision , as well as others that provide us with more in-depth information about their meaning. Among the most relevant we can point out the following: insult, mockery, mockery, affront , offence, insult, contempt, humiliation, insult and vexation . On the other hand we have the antonyms praise, praise and flattery .
As we can notice in the list of synonyms, almost all of them point to an action that is carried out to cause something negative to the person who receives it, usually a great shame that is recorded deep inside thanks to the force with which it is carried out. performs and the fact that there are usually more people present.
This brings us once again to the concept of public ridicule , which in some way can be seen in the example of the footballer who demands payment of an overdue amount from those responsible for his club and instead receives a kind of lesson that also warns the other players of what can happen to them if they follow the same path.
An expression that has practically the same meaning as public ridicule is pillorying . On the one hand, we must define the concept of pillory : it was a factory or stone column that was placed at the entrance to certain towns and on which the heads of the prisoners or those executed were displayed. That said, let's think that when someone exposes another person publicly because of their mistake so that they are ashamed and everyone around them finds out about the situation, they are not doing anything very different than hanging their head in a square.
Although the practice of pillorying has not been practiced for centuries, dating especially from the Middle Ages , this expression continues to appear in various publications and, although to a lesser extent, in everyday speech.
“Mocking of Christ” , finally, is the name of a painting that the German artist Matthias Grünewald painted at the beginning of the 16th century . Currently, the work is exhibited in the city of Berlin .