Whether American self-assertiveness fits into today's crammed and touchy world can be debated.
But in jokes that appeal to children and primitive people, cruelty and boastful self-assertiveness are much in evidence.
The German list also has strong themes of self-improvement and of self-assertiveness running through it.
Apart from confirming his distrust of learning, his resentment at his father's disappointing experiences fostered the boy's self-assertiveness and independence of character.
Consumer advocates say that the trend is a welcome exercise in self-assertiveness by a nation that used to be too meek.
Midori Yokokawa, an editor at the fashion magazine Forest Girl, which was launched in October to cater to this new phenomenon, said: "Forest girls are wary of all forms of aggression or self-assertiveness.
The relative freedom and self-assertiveness of these women can be held against them, especially by Indians in more conservative parts of the country, as "loose behavior," a phrase that hints at a multitude of sins.
All the same, habitual Kurdish caution is giving way to greater self-assertiveness as Baghdad's divided political elite quails before the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (Isis).
Maybe that's why, as the art historian Esther Pasztory has suggested, a tremor of perturbation and pessimism seems to run through Aztec art, coursing beneath its ferocious self-assertiveness.
In Upper Bann, Trimble himself achieved the unique triumph of topping the poll in one of Ulster's more hardline unionist constituencies on the basis of an open advocacy of compromise rather than on the agendas of ethnic and communal self-assertiveness that have been the stock-in-trade of unionist politicians in the past.
And as Baroness Barbara Wootton pointed out in 1959, commenting on the training of social workers, "Until we have abolished mental and physical illness, poverty and overcrowding, as well as such human frailties as jealousy and self-assertiveness, many of the problems presented are frankly insoluble.
