ABSTRACT
This chapter is designed to understand aspects of acrimonious talk in facilitative conflict mediations. “Acrimonious” was chosen as a descriptor because it is associated with anger, accusation, bitterness and mean-spiritedness. These are words you can find with “acrimonious” in a dictionary definition or thesaurus, and in a Google Scholar search for “acrimonious dispute”, the first twenty examples described everything from families to scholars to co-workers to historical situations all characterised by anger, accusation, bitterness and mean-spiritedness. These may be identified by the wording, but the means of expressing acrimony are rich, indeed. Everything from a pause when one withholds a smile to a glare to a strangled voice to adding an “unnecessary” adverb like “essentially” to a description can let the listener feel the bitterness or accusation in the speaker. Saying something “obvious” or withholding something expected, putting disdain in one’s voice or making a demeaning comparison – the means of doing acrimony are linguistic, rhetorical, nonverbal, and possibly unlimited. We decided to rely on the judgment of listeners instead of trying for an analytical definition.
