It seems that this phrase is used to describe pretty much every single teenage behaviour.
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 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!!!
Olmai@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
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).
Olmai@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.