Could Putdowns Be a Form of Putting a Curse on Someone?
The witches, or the wicked ones anyway, have mostly disappeared from the story we tell ourselves, and few of us lie awake fearing a curse. Or do we? Think about what happens when someone puts you down to lift themselves up, to stand a little taller by making you smaller. If you half-believe what they say, and the people around you believe it too, something very curse-like has taken hold. The force in any curse was always the same thing: how much faith the target placed in it.
There's a second question worth sitting with. Can a steady drip of putdowns count as abuse? It can. A person can be worn down by words as surely as by fists, left browbeaten and stripped of their footing. Picture the relative who never has a kind word for one particular family member, and then notice how the rest of the household slowly picks up the habit until the criticism becomes a group project.
Aiming this at a child is something uglier. A kid usually has no way to test whether the insult is true, so they absorb it and carry it as fact. Other children in the house follow along, because monkey see, monkey do. And a sibling who watches it happen to a brother or sister often learns to keep the attention trained on that sibling's flaws, partly out of fear that the glare will swing their way next.
A joke only works as a joke when the person it lands on is laughing too. With children, the usual result is tears, not laughter. The ones dishing it out will then act baffled, claiming they can't understand why the target isn't amused, and they hang a label on the child: bad sport.