It seems that this phrase is used to describe pretty much every single teenage behaviour.
Thats ok darling im sure your not meant to.
Based on your previous posts, I assume you are a Mandarin speaking Taiwanese?
Passive Aggressive 就是好像我妈恨我的时候她根本拒绝跟我说话，然后用它母老虎的恶眼神来看我，想说句话都不行，连骂都不骂，几乎当我不存在。
或者… 一个同学故意的，假装“不小心”碰到你，然后你去 confront 他的时候他就说 “it was just an accident, I’m sooooooooo sorrrryyyy, 你这么生气干嘛，都说了对不起了，he he he （偷笑）” 然后就跟他的同伙嘲笑你的种族或者 mock 你的母语 (他们不是华裔的美国同学)
或者… 我告诉我妈我想自杀的时候，她跟我说：“用不用开车载你去啊？😂” （她真的那么笑着跟我说 😭）
It’s all kind of behaviour that aims to harm, hurt, or anger someone without being upfront about the intent.
If I hit you or insult you, that’s not passive. If I say “some of us actually do the dishes around here” within earshot of someone that I believe doesn’t do them often enough, that’s passive aggressive.
Like most behaviors, it’s not inherently bad… but I would argue it often is. There are better tools out there to solve problems.
I like describing behaviours as effective or ineffective. “Bad” is tying judgment to it.
Being direct is generally more effective than passive/aggressive, if one’s intent is to build on a relationship, but passive/aggressive may fit the bill if you no longer give a shit and want to simply get your digs in before leaving (say a shitty boss).
You’re right in that (in)effective would work here, but I did intend to also apply judgment. It often is not the most effective technique, but I also believe it is often unnecessarily hurtful and used as petty vengeance. I see it as an immature reaction from people who don’t care about the receiver, or haven’t developed other ways to communicate.
Take your shitty boss example : You’re angry at them, and you want to express it. Anger is used to signal your desire to change a situation. If you’re leaving, the only thing left to change is their behavior to future employees. If you use passive aggressive methods, you’re either hurting them back for simple vengeance, in which case you just don’t care about them as a human being because this hurting serves no purpose, or you’re trying to change their future behavior. In that case, you will probably just paint yourself as an asshole, which will invalidate your position in their mind. It might sometimes work, but I would not consider it effective compared to being direct for example.
It’s a tactic used by people who don’t have the confidence, ability, or power in a relationship to communicate directly. It’s usually used to be spiteful, take revenge, or express displeasure, thinly veiled behind some plausible deniability. A passive aggressive action can be something like:
A person preparing food for someone they feel is unappreciative might deliberately over-salt or overcook it to spoil that person’s enjoyment of it
A person who doesn’t like things being left on the floor might purposely step on or trip over/kick something they see there, damaging or dirtying it
A person resenting being asked to do a task might make very little effort, do it wrong, or make the situation worse than it was to avoid being asked in the future
It’s essentially a way to be hostile and unpleasant to people you socialize with, but if called on their actions, the person being passive aggressive can make excuses or deflect blame. It’s not a healthy dynamic and leads to frustration and erosion of trust on all sides. It perpetuates and exacerbates problems rather than resolving them.
What a nice question.
As a native speaker, I will try to answer without being pedantic with a dictionary: to be passive aggressive is to answer with an unusual assumption and to act like the other party should have known all along.
E.g. if you want someone to leave and it is snowing, say “I just cleaned off the snow from your car so you can make it home safe. When do you plan on leaving?” This places an expectation and social pressure to accept the gift of cleaning the snow by leaving soon.
E.g. if you want to leave work at 5pm daily and your boss knows this and adds a frivolous mandatory meeting to the office calendar. You can take notes in the meeting then at the end send the email with notes to the recipients and say “this meeting could have been an email with no knowledge lost”. This implies that your boss did a disservice by wasting everyone’s time when they could have just used a secretary and an email and let you keep to your informal time to leave boundaries.
Good luck figuring out and understanding the actual definition!!!
I think the first example works better by leaving off the “when are you leaving” question.
But it’s still fits the definition.
It means someone saying something that on the surface sounds nice, but is actually meant to be insulting or challenging. It can be subtle until you learn to recognize it. Even then, it’s annoying because sometimes one has to question "were they being passive
Not really a shower thought. Try [email protected]
You think he wasn’t in the shower?
Should I delete this post?
E: seems obvious that I shouldn’t
It’s when someone is resisting or being hostile, but they’re not being obvious about it.
Like your boss tells you to open up every box and count the stuff in it. You tell them “okay sure boss I’ll do that” and then you go off and do something else as soon as the boss is gone.
Or you have some person you don’t like and you’re left alone with their earbuds. You take a quick moment to break their earbuds when no one will know. And you still act nice to the person.
The textbook definition is being aggressive without partaking in direct aggression. A simple rule of thumb difference is that with passive aggressive behaviour you can pretend you didn’t know you were aggressive.
Like, if you throw a brick at your neighbour’s window while he’s watching TV - there’s no way you can twist it as meaning anything else. That’s the normal non-passive aggressive and you can’t really pretend you didn’t mean it the way you did it.
If you pour water in the middle of harsh winter in front of their door, that’s passive aggressive - you avoid direct confrontation (unless they happen to see you) but are aggressive towards them. He might suspect it’s you (you threw a brick through his window after all!) but he can’t prove it.
That’s what’s frustrating about passive aggression - everyone in the room (including the passive aggressive person, their target and any bystander) knows what’s going on, but it’s not direct so the aggressor can claim “omg I didn’t mean it that way.”
