Re: I approve
It's only just over a couple of hundred years since men in England mostly wore swords around town so they could stick anyone who annoyed them enough.
Wearing swords was fashionable just over 200 years ago to demonstrate how patriotic you were, and suggest just how ready you were to leap into battle with the French who were being stopped from invading at the time only by the Royal Navy blockade of the invasion fleet.
Contrary to popular belief, people did not just get insulted and whip out a sword and go for somebody. That would have been considerably more socially unacceptable 200 years ago than doing so would be today, and would have met with far more of an immediate and adverse response than is readily comprehensible today.
Today in the UK you'd get dozens of police try and arrest you without hurting you. The Police Standards people would worry about having deployed batons or tasers and the courts might give them maybe a year in prison if that.
Then? They'd kill you. The town watch would say "uh, no." and call out the militia, yeomanry or army and you have been hunted down and summarily killed like a dangerous animal at the slightest resistance, and "yeah, we shot him with a few .70 calibre musket balls" would have been perfectly accepted by everybody involved without question. If you surrendered? They'd be a trial, they'd be sentenced to death and hung. Being out at night with a blackened face was punishable by death, let alone running around threatening your betters with a sword.
You'd have ended up buried in an unmarked and unconsecrated grave as a symbol that even the Church and God who would nominally forgive anything wanted nothing to do with you. You'd forfeited the Church's protection both in this world and the next; being left to face God (or the Devil) alone. To people who believed in both, that was rather a big thing. This si why they didn't have much of a problem with mass
If you were challenging somebody to a duel as a result of some form of mortal insult then you also didn't whip out swords and go for it, you appointed a friend to enquire of one of his friends if he wished to make a public apology and withdraw his insulting remarks etc or if it needed to make some form of challenge, with lots of back and forth about discussing the finer points of exactly what form of apology needed to be made.
Long before duelling was eradicated (and duelling was never legally accepted; killing somebody was still murder) the "some form of challenge" had been supplemented with the libel laws we have today, which is why even today admitting that you were wrong and apologising at an early stage makes it effectively impossible to sue you.