the.com/silent treatment
Punishing someone by making them guess the crime and the sentence.
means A deliberate refusal to speak to someone as a way of expressing anger or punishing them.
from A straightforward 20th-century compound — 'silent' plus 'treatment,' the latter used in the clinical sense of a course of action applied to a patient. Its ironic edge is that 'treatment' usually implies care or remedy, so 'the silent treatment' casts cold shoulder punishment as a kind of therapy being administered, which is exactly the passive-aggressive joke the phrase runs on.
- psychology term
- called stonewalling, predicts divorce better than yelling does
- brain effect
- activates same regions as physical pain
- irony
- requires constant effort to seem like effortless indifference
- actual message
- you win if you break first