What is umbrage?
James Gilligan’s book, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic provides one, oblique answer your question. Gilligan argues that much of the violence that people – especially men – commit is the result of perceived disrespect. People with extremely low self-esteem and internalized feelings of shame have a much lower threshold for taking offense, and often respond with disproportionate anger or violence to seemingly trivial insults. In this view, umbrage is a form of the innate reaction that people have to perceived threats of all sorts – physical, emotional, psychological, and so forth. But the depth of perceived threat and the resulting response is disproportionately large.
