[/quote]First I agree that dueling should not be part of a modern society and I wish it would go away on Manticore and Grayson (though AFAIK those are limited to swords, and only available to Steadholders challenging a Protector's decree).penny wrote:My second concern is the question of who is potentially on the list of being subject to this archaic barbaric concept of honor? The Prime Minister? The Queen? Can any 'yahoo' simply go on the faxes and goad anyone into a duel? Do words hurt? Do words kill? Honor goaded Summervale into a duel by slapping him. If physical abuse is the only way to goad someone into a duel, then nobody is going to get close enough to goad the Queen. It is obvious that physical abuse is not the only method of impugning someones honor. As a matter of fact, who actually impugned Honor's honor? Summervale or Pavel Young? It was simply a job as far as Summervale was concerned. Dueling was his profession.
But I digress. Is the act of verbally impugning someones honor publically, enough to initiate the need for the impugned to challenge, lest risk to their honor? In which case, one could publically announce appalling “unspeakables” about the Queen. Is the Queen immune from losing her honor; from having to issue a challenge? Regardless of the fact that I think the Queen has some surprises in store for a potential duelist with her weapon of choice. Her sword!
As to your question, the physical slap was not necessary. (Correctly, or I guess plausibly) accusing Denver Summervale of being a professional duelist was more than enough to force him to challenge Honor. The slap just moved things along and overcame his initial shock.
In that situation declining would have been tantamount to admitting the accusation. If nothing else, refusing to challenge Honor would have ended his career as a professional duelist because his tacit admission to being one would be honorable grounds for anybody else to decline his attempts to duel. (You can't be dishonored by the dishonorable)
However you couldn't just go up to a random person on the street and provoke a duel by accusing them of being a professional duelist (for one thing they've probably never fought a duel). And generally the person who has been offended against is free to ignore the offense, or to back out of the duel, with no real perceived loss of honor.
So you can't count on insulting someone to provoke a duel.
And your claim of dishonor, if you challenge them, must be plausible or believable; else there's no dishonor in refusing the challenge. So just those make it somewhat difficult to randomly challenge key military or government folks.
And then, as tlb mentioned, there are legal limits that prohibit some duels. Two more that the (sometimes drunken) wiki reminds me of are:
1) It is illegal to duel journalists,
2) It is illegal to challenge an opposing party in an existing litigation matter.
And there may be more limits that RFC hasn't had reason to share with us. For example I assume it's illegal to challenge a minor. (Clearly though you can challenge a member of the House of Lords, Pavel was one - so there can't be a blanket ban on any challenge of a government person; but conceivably there could be restrictions on who can challenge a sitting Lord. Or restrictions on challenging cabinet members. We just don't know)