Paper short abstract:

In Estonia, the 2015 refugee crisis was met with sharp reactions from the public, where the attackers used both direct insults as well as offensive rhetorics immersed with phraseology. This study sets out to describe and analyse the use of figurative language in offensive speech on the internet.

Paper long abstract:

In Estonia, the 2015 refugee crisis was met with sharp reactions from the public, most of which can be seen as insulting to the targets. But it is not always that the attackers choose to use the most logical solution - direct insult. Almost equally often we can encounter offensive rhetorics immersed with phraseology and/or humour based on sayings. This study sets out to describe and analyse the use of phraseology in offensive speech on the internet, sometimes dubbed hate speech, to give an account of its patterns of usage, with the recent migration crisis as a case in point.

The material for this study comes from the internet comments and posts following the 2015/2016 New Year's Eve programme Tujurikkuja ('Mood Spoiler') gathered from Estonian online media shortly after the programme was aired. The focus of this presentation will be on the nature, more specifically the rhetoric devices of public reverberation and vernacular expressive mechanisms following the parody. The study draws conclusions from the diachronic analysis of the humorous text itself, the internet comments discussing the show and the journalists' reaction to the controversial video in order to describe the role of phraseology in the diverse discursive realisations, effects, and functions of othering via humour. The results suggest that investigating the phraseology of humorous texts and their public reception offers a good entry point into the practices of othering between and within ethnic and/or social groups and the role of phraseology in them.