sass

This term captures a specific blend of confidence and rudeness, often associated with a playful or defiant spirit. It is more colloquial than "insolence" and carries a lighter, sometimes admiring connotation of wit or "spirit," though it remains primarily negative when used by an authority figure to describe a subordinate.

As a noun, the word is uncountable. It describes an abstract quality of speech rather than individual instances of talking, meaning it cannot be pluralized as "sasses" to mean multiple disrespectful comments. Instead, one would use a partitive like "a bit of sass" or "a streak of sass" to quantify it.