Arwa, I agree that it's not easy. But I also think it's a trained skill. I've spent lots of time working with people with mental illnesses, or with adolescents. So I've gotten lots of verbal abuse sent my way. You develop a pretty thick skin before too long, which I think is valuable. I just think it's dangerous to say that words or powerful, because someone will take that and use it to justify violence: "He insulted my mother, so I hit him in the head with a chair. It's not my fault!"

I understand that "tangent" come from mathematics, that's why I thought it might be an idiom in that context. Thanks for the clarification, Alex. I'm sure you watched "The Notebook", it was very touching and I was really moved by the film. I told my friend about and recomended her to watch it but she wasn't moved the way I was, so yeah, people have different reactions towards the same things. I may sympathy a criminal in a film because I see her/him differently. Ok! Now we are really going off on a tangent:)

@Alex, just as Arwa stated"beautifully arranged words can create wealth...", Whereas evil words can "start wars", What i said is it was related to the topic, not exactly the same one. Yes, to some extent lauguage violence is "to hurt someone with curses or harsh words", but it doesnt mean you have to shout them out, (there are even idoms like" barking dogs seldom bite." cheating or scamming via deceitful words are even worse) It hurts enough if the words have distorted the facts. That is what i mean to say. But i havent noticed about the movie you said previously. I will see that movie soon,SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET, it sounds familiar, thanks for bringing it to this topic.

I think that the idiom might come from mathematics; I remember from math classes there is something called a tangent in algebra or maybe geometry. I think on scientific calculators there is a function for this. By the way, the world 'algebra' is from the Arabic 'al-jabr', of which you might know the meaning ('balancing' possibly). At least, I have read so in Wikipedia. What you have said is similar to something I have observed; that different people interpret the same thing in different ways. For example, I recently watched the 'The Hobbit', the movie just released with my mother. She was very turned off by the character of Golem. But t I had more sympathy to him, because he was just a flawed character who could be seduced by things like many others. He was almost neither good or evil, so you could not feel any way about him. There are many other examples but this comes to my mind at the present.