ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

ad hominem is often used when you are debating someone, but it becomes personal and the facts are being lost, so here comes the insulting comments. This is due to ad hominem taking over and usually this shows a sign of weakness!

The phrase ad hominem, literally “to a person,” originally meant in rhetoric and logic “by appealing to the audience’s feelings, emotions, or interests, not to their intelligence or reason.” Nowadays the usual meaning of ad hominem is “by attacking an opponent’s character or motives, not their arguments.” Hominem, the object of the preposition ad “to,” is the accusative singular case of the Latin noun homō (inflectional stem homin-) “human being (of either sex), individual, person.”Homō is also used colloquially in Roman comedy (Plautus): 'Mī homō et mea mulier, vōs salūtō, literally “My man and my woman, I greet you.'

An example sentence could be:

Greta Thunberg, at age 16, has quickly become one of the most visible climate activists in the world. Her detractors increasingly rely on ad hominem attacks to blunt her influence.

So please take the time to research facts before trying out a debate with someone!