Affront is the dishonor and shame resulting from a certain saying or fact. It is an outrage, a grievance, an offense, an ignominy, or an injury. For example: “I cannot accept such an affront: I demand that you retract”, “Mr. Cautore must answer to the Justice for the unjustified insults he pronounced”, “The misuse of the national symbols is an affront to the entire nation “.
It is customary to talk about what is called a public affront. As its name suggests, it is a personal offense that is carried out on someone in particular and that is known by everyone who belongs to that community. Population that does not hesitate to condemn that.
The affront, therefore, can occur with certain statements or expressions. The concept does not have a precise definition, since it can overlap with other notions. An affront can express a truth or a lie, and can even become a crime (whether it is slander or injury). If an intellectual comments, in the cases of pedophile priests, that religious are abusers by nature, he will be committing an affront.
A soccer coach can assure that the words of a sports journalist are an affront if said reporter reports the technical director’s little attachment to responsible work.
An action can also become an affront. A rock singer who burns the flag of a country on stage or a painter who breaks an image of Jesus Christ at a press conference will be doing insults that will generate the reaction of many people.
In addition to all this, we would have to establish that the term that concerns us becomes part of the title of one of the most important chapters of the work “El Cantar del Mío Cid”, dated in the year 1200 and which relates the adventures of the knight Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid). Specifically, this is the third chapter and is called “Sing of the affront of Corpes.”
The protagonists of this third song are the infants of Carrión who suffer a disgrace when they show their cowardice, both before a lion and in front of the Arabs against what they are fighting at that time. For this reason they decide to take revenge and what they do is travel with their wives, the daughters of El Cid, to whip them in a certain place and leave them abandoned.
The girls’ father asks the king for justice and succeeds. They take revenge on the husbands and the weddings are annulled, so that soon afterwards the women will be again engaged, in this case with the infants of Aragon and Navarra.
In ancient times, men who felt affront used to challenge their critics to a duel. It was a way of defending honor, demanding a retraction or risking his life for the conflict. Swords, revolvers or pistols were some of the weapons that were used most frequently within this type of death duels.
