In the article they point out she said it once and it wasn't part of a pattern.

Let's not trivialize upending someone's entire life because they hurt your feelings.

"Let's not trivialize firing someone because they (verbally) abused someone"? Are you OK with mobbing in the workplace? They may be "just words" but the can actually have a huge mental negative effect on someone, especially if sustained.

I'm not saying this level of seriousness is what happened here, but you exaggerate in the other direction.

As with all forms of verbal abuse, the presence of a power imbalance is paramount. And since we abolished slavery, it is about as high as it gets here.

What an employee says about their boss generally has zero implications on their career and lives, so long as it does not outright accuse them of a crime. When's the last time someone called you to provide a reference on your boss? I thought so.

In turn, what a boss says about their employees can be entirely career-ending and therefore life-altering, even if said in jest or later retracted. A higher standard exists precisely because the stakes are so much higher.

We shouldn't tolerate verbal abuse to avoid upending the life of the abuser.

Yes, adopt the language of therapists to add some gravitas. Sorry, but getting called an asshole/dickhead/whatever (especially if it's true) is not abuse in this context. Even less so given the power imbalance between the employee and the employer.

In a strange plot twist, calling trivial things “abuse” is what actually trivializes abuse.

I'd say that making such determinations based on fragmentary information, such as decontextualised headlines, is a better characterisation. Arguments like these (where some people say "it's abuse!" and others say "it's not abuse!", and nobody focuses on how they're not using the same "it") make the lines seem blurred when actually, it's pretty clear-cut most of the time.

Even if you know the lines aren't blurred, if you perceive others acting as though it's up for debate, you're more likely to consider bad-faith appeals to the subjectivity of abuse as perhaps being in good faith. Few among us are philosophers capable of reasoning everything through from first principles, all the time, so these things matter.

Sure, I agree with all that, well-said. “Dickhead, asshole, douchebag, fuckstain” are terms of endearment in some of my social circles. Context matters.

Tone and body language are like 80%+ of in-person, verbal communication.

We need to be very careful to, as I mentioned, not “abuse” the term abuse to the point where it becomes meaningless. If everything is abuse, nothing is abuse, and we need to invent a new term.

Someone calling names is pretty trivial though, literally the behavior of schoolyard children, and it certainly should take more than that to rattle an adult.

Calling others names shows a total lack of self-control and disrespect towards others. It's toxic in personal relationships too. If my boss called me names I would rm -rf my hard drive and walk out immediately. I have too much self respect to deal with that.

Frankly, if you can't give and take the piss, you wouldn't last five minutes in a British workplace.

We don't take ourselves too seriously, and find people who do take themselves seriously worthy of some extra piss taking to bring them down a peg.

(Oh, and rm -rf'ing your HD *would* land you in very serious legal trouble. It is a criminal act under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. And rightly so.)

We actually have free speech in the US but we don't allow people to freely abuse us and will walk.

Same thing in Blighty old boy.

> Calling others names shows a total lack of self-control and disrespect towards others.

As does some of the conduct that may lead to the counterparty calling you names in the heat of the moment.

Blame the victim territory. Control your emotions and good things will follow.

That's the case for both sides of this equation.

You'll see plenty of it here on HN - some commenters are great at just staying within the guidelines while pushing others over the edge in frustration.