The recognized, and sometimes accepted, excuse for bad behavior: "I'm only human" is like a tarp. You can toss it over only so much junk before it ceases to disguise what it covers. If a person has simply lost their temper they will later have some regret. For such outbursts, apologies and forgiveness may be exchanged. But when someone blasts away in a fluent flurry of rage and later says they were provoked and the behavior calls for an apology not from them but from the object of their rage, then a very different game is being played. In the first case a person loses their temper, in the second, they loose it.
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