Being a gay man who has known friends who were savagely beaten by assailants yelling that word, I will thank you not to use "queer" as anything but the slur that it always has been. I understand that this is a generational division but the point of this blog is the polite exchange of ideas and there is nothing remotely polite in referri…
Being a gay man who has known friends who were savagely beaten by assailants yelling that word, I will thank you not to use "queer" as anything but the slur that it always has been. I understand that this is a generational division but the point of this blog is the polite exchange of ideas and there is nothing remotely polite in referring to people by what has for most of my life been one of the two ugliest slurs in the American lexicon.
There is nothing proud and nothing liberating about donning the mantle of defectiveness.
In Levans411's defence, the field of academic study, which underpins many of the more insane ideas we're currently facing (and some that are far worse than anything that's yet hit the mainstream), is literally called "Queer Theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory).
I think it's perfectly reasonable to stick to LGBTQ or some variation thereof to talk about people (gay/lesbian/trans etc always work fine for me), but the academics and politics related to the ideology, it's hard to talk about without using their actual names.
But this raises a good point. I think we're reaching a point where I might put together some kind of etiquette guide. The precision of language is super important. And especially as we deal with many sensitive subjects here, we should probably have at least on for two ground rules.
So let me get this straight. You are saying that a university curriculum gives legitimacy to the word? Really? "Allow me to retort."
* Many universities give tenure to supply side economists, teaching a Laffer cocktail napkin model that has a perfect track record of failure
* Physics departments are loaded with string theorists, a cultic group who try to push out other physicists engaged in other research because it's "anti-string." And string theory not only has no experimental support aside from underpinnings in attainable physics that also have a perfect track record of failure.
"Queer theory" comes out of postmodernism, which is again, the most intellectually vapid social model in post-Enlightenment history, little more than neologisms ("heteronormative phallocentricity") and radical egalitarians with weak minds.
"So let me get this straight. You are saying that a university curriculum gives legitimacy to the word?"
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's difficult to talk about the field without using its name. If I wanted people to stop legitimising the concept of race, which I do (I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I avoid the use of the word "race" whenever possible, and stick it in scare quotes whenever I need to use it), I'd still have to accept the fact that Critical Race Theory is the name of a significant field of study that is responsible for a number of the ideas we're grappling with today. Same for things like "whiteness studies."
This isn't a university curriculum. It is, as you yourself say, a branch of critical theory that comes out of postmodernism, as most "critical theory" does. I think it's not only stupid but dangerous. That doesn't change the fact that it exists and it will inevitably be necessary to talk about it from time to time.
I've made the effort not to mention it by name at all throughout this comment, but it's cumbersome to say the least. I don't think it's a reasonable expectation for everybody who might come here to discuss the topic. I'm more than happy to ask people not to use the word as a slur. As I am with all slurs. I'm also happy to ask people not to refer to people using the word even when not used as a slur. But the academic theory only has one name. What do you suggest?
"The Study of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" works for me. So it's a few more words, that's preferable to enshrining a vicious slur.
"Race" has never been a slur that I know of.
"Theory" in science means more like "proof" in the vernacular; *atoms* are a "theory." QT is not even at the level of hypothesis and is undeserving of "theory." I'd wager the same is true of CRT.
""The Study of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" works for me. So it's a few more words, that's preferable to enshrining a vicious slur."
Chris, I sincerely hope you can understand why I'm not going to ask everybody who wants to refer to this established field of study to substitute its name for this. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to your point. I am. But there's no such thing as Ni**er theory. And if there were, I'm as sure as I can be that I wouldn't try to prohibit reference to it. As long as the reference was to the field of study and not to people.
If anybody ever uses that word as a slur here, I'll come down on them like a ton of bricks. In fact, I'll probably just revoke their commenting privileges permanently. If it slips under my radar, please feel free to point it out to me. But I don't think anybody benefits if this turns into a place where intent and context don't matter.
I'm not asking you to enforce anything in referring to that foppish faux-academic bullshit, and I doubt it will ever come up. But I hope you understand why I see it as equivalent to "Ni66er Theory."
Because it is.
The assertion that the word has been "reclaimed" is bullshit. It is as I said; just another extension into offending the "str8s." Except it backfired and now a lot of gay people and hangers-on like the crossdressers and the gender cosplayers are stupidly calling themselves defectives.
Count me out.
And while we're at it, count me out of
* "they" for one person
* target and impact as verbs
* invite and ask as nouns
* unique to mean unusual
* reach out to mean contact or email (verbs)
* moving forward to mean proceed
* share to mean say
And all the rest I can't think of right now because I almost went into a coma this morning
I agree with you. I use the word to describe a younger generation and a different political movement, not my own.
The word no longer means “gay and lesbian”. I know heterosexuals who consider themselves “queer” because they engage in other-then-missionary-style sex. “Queer” now means “I don’t want to be considered old and straight.”
Very different than when I was young and being a lesbian was illegal.
I'm a little surprised at your reaction to it. The LGBTQ community appropriated that word long ago. When you and I were kids, kids called each other 'queer' but it didn't mean homosexuality; it meant someone who was weird, stupid. etc. Adults used the word to describe people who were a little odd or perhaps 'not right in the head'; at some point I think in the early '70s (you might know the history better than I) gay rights activists 'reclaimed' the word and started using it a lot, including for organizational names like Queer Nation.
The 'f' word for gays, I get. It's like the n-word for blacks, the c-word for women. You. Don't. Say. Those. Words.
'Queer' on the other hand doesn't strike me as being offensive, and I know of no one else apart from you now who thinks it is. It's got a fairly nebulous meaning for and even today, I'm *still* not sure what it means when activists use it. I mean, it's what the 'Q' in LGBTQ stands for.
The adoption of "queer" was a push back at the increasing normalization of gayness, the next step in the confrontational belligerence that so hindered our progress for so long. A lot of radical gays regarded assimilation as the ugliest word in the language and strongly identified with being marginalized in an enclave culture. So they started to call themselves "queer" as just another form of "in your face."
The next generation had never lived through having friends put in the hospital by assailants yelling that beautiful reclaimed word at them, and thought it was normal.
Well, I visited a few of those bashed friends in the hospital and I have no affection for that word. I will thank you not to use it.
As for the Ever Lengthening Acronym, I cut it off after the B. And many will tell you that the Q stands for "questioning" because they know it remains an offensive slur.
They can change what they say the Q means but we all know what it *did* mean. I accept that you really dislike the word and don't want it used to describe others; but I'm not convinced it means only what you say it means. Nor am I sure it really much matters *what* people are yelling at you when they beat you, guaranteed if they're calling you 'Beethoven' while doing it, you will never think the same way about Beethoven again, and probably will never like his music as much as you did before, assuming you ever did.
I'm with you on cutting off the Q, but I don't know about the T. That's been there for awhile, and before transitioning became cool. So, for awhile I think, it referred to the few gender dysphorics or perhaps confused gay men who would understandably be embraced by a group of marginalized people who were a lot less extreme than they are now.
Maybe I'll cut off the Q, because frankly the whole damn long-ass acronym is just silly, and a testament to how self-absorbed and narcissistic the whole movement has become. Not to mention misogynist and anti-lesbian.
Self-absorbed, narcissistic, and tyrannical. Lists of strident demands, constantly lengthening the list of anathemized words (I don't try to keep up; I still say transvestite and transsexual), orthodoxy-policing, strident, and vain. How many bathrooms is a gas station required to have? A small business?
I've known many dysphoric men, dated two of them, and I probably care more about them than the vain woke crowd does but I also know that their concerns are, beyond support and sympathy, not mine. Both of those I dated have transitioned surgically and are probably married to men. As women.
I think the statistics tell the tale; the great majority of the Ts are fake and are making the claim for attention unless it's a transition to being gay, and if they emerge from that phase missing pieces they were born with, that is horrible.
Edit: I like Beethoven, but not just the Choral Symphony that made Alex go out the window. I like the quartets, the 7th, the chamber sonatas.
I stand by the history I recounted. The adoption of "queer" was purely intended to remain offensive in a society that no longer found homosexuality so alarming. My memory of this transition is crystal sharp.
Just as "unique" used to mean singular and now everyone thinks it means distinctive. I tell people what it's supposed to mean and they are completely unfamiliar with the definition.
Same happened to "queer," but you won't find many of us over 50 or so who don't remember what I'm talking about.
There's a common term for the trans tyrants Steve asked me to not use on here. Well, I am making the same request to you.
It's not a word I customarily use so it won't be much of a challenge. But I'm with Steve on the need to use it if you're talking about the school of thought, or the activist group. "Queer Theory" gets a lot of coverage in "Cynical Theories" about the woke left's obsession with critical everything theory so if a thread here breaks out about the book, you'll probably see the theory referenced a lot.
Yeah, I'm pretty clear on that, and like I said, not a problem because I never refer to them that way anyway...I never thought it was that offensive, I avoided it because I thought it was outdated. Also vague. When they added the Q to LGBT I thought it was redundant too, but though, well, maybe that'll catch all the other Others. Fat farkin' chance, now *everyone's* got to have their own letter just like when they were kids they all had to have their own trophies.
Back when it was only four (there were two Ts for a while as -vestities and -sexuals both wanted top billing, before the monosyllable) a lot of people dutifully permuted the order ... GBLT, BTLG ... and even in the mention on here that ticked me off they were alternated, T/Q. Q/T. That is just so compulsive.
I've never understood even why lesbians don't like being included under "gay." Gay men, gay women, what is the problem.
But that ever-lengthening acronym is just stupid, people of wildly differing interests and goals who have little to do with each other.
Even academic use of the Q word, like the N word is problematic due to their original use as a slur. The same can be said of the other F word associated with "F bashing."
I wonder why the wokies are still using it, then? I thought they were out to trash every conceivable word which could cause offense to anyone anywhere. If the word is *that* bad I'm genuinely surprised they haven't gotten to it yet.
It's not so much that I worry about causing offense to others, it's for me. When I was in Vietnam it was common for people to use the word "gook." It was used in infantry training and staging battalion as part of a dehumanization of the enemy process. Thing is, we were supposed to be there to help the South Vietnamese, we served around ARVN and ROK Marines. They were not the enemy, but there was that word, so natural to everyone.
People just accept it. I try to not let things that are a part of a dehumanization process become normal in my own head. Dehumanization is beyond insult or offensiveness, and it is a poison in our own soul.
I've also never called a woman the "B" word. Calling one a dog in heat is dehumanizing. Maybe that makes it OK to smack her around?
Feminism really went sour fast. It quickly came to the point of a monoculture; there was only one acceptable outlook for women, a man-hating office tyrannical boss in executive drag. And there are women who actually do want something like a more traditional role in their lives, wife homemaker and mother, not because they've been brainwashed into subservience but because they didn't *want* to be an office B. The bitter chin-beard radical feminists excoriated them.
I also got taught that 'Jap' was bad to say even though it was short for Japanese. With WWII still fairly fresh in my mother's head after I was born, she didn't like the way people in her day called people "japs" or worse, 'dirty jap'. It wasn't until high school that I learned what "gerry" was when the word was used in Bye Bye Birdie, the musical I was in. (Once again Mom the WWII Expert helped here). I knew about 'gook' (I think that was common in the Korean War too). I'll use the 'B' word but I avoid the 'C' word. Although I used it in the article I wrote for a feminist website (still not published yet) because I was quoting transwomen who loved to call women transphobic c's on Twitter. Hmmmm....then there's the word 'deplorables'...
I could give a very long list of slang words used for people from different countries, including the European ones. They were common when I was young but not so much now. The stuff I prefer to not normalize in my own head pertains to making it OK to kill or beat the crap out of someone.
The big one came out of making it OK to enslave people. I find it hard to believe that people in their heart of hearts were not aware of the evil of slavery, but they eased their conscience via the dehumanization of the people they enslaved. Yet they knew they were human.
Runaway slave ads gave descriptions that included the talents of the slave to help identify them because they wanted their slave back. Interestingly, those ads that have been preserved give a history counter to that dehumanization. ~He is an accomplished carpenter and black smith. Known to play the fiddle at barn dances. Speaks English and French~ In a society where teaching a slave to read was a crime the description is of an accomplished and talented man. So, he was called a "N". Catch my property and return him to me for a reward.
Shortenings usually end up being slurs but they're inevitable. Japanese —>Jap, Nipponese—>Nip, these are as inevitable as refrigerator—>fridge. But they end up being slurs.
But not Brit--British. Then again, one can turn *anything* into a slur. Haters will pick up on anything and do it because changing the labels doesn't change the minds. Several years ago in a bar, some friends and I tested it out by being bigoted toward each other for totally non-political things. We called each other Pink Shirt and Baseball Cap and and hurled those labels as though they were the n-word. We were in hysterics. It's why I'm not in favour of constantly rendering new neutral words 'offensive'. It's just silly that you can say 'people of colour' now rather than 'coloured people'. I asked my black roommate in college why you can't say 'coloured people' anymore (which was acceptable ten years prior) and she said she wasn't sure, maybe making reference to skin colour at all? Then there's Negro, which is merely the Spanish word for black; yeah, that's where the verboten n-word comes from, but pronounced properly there's nothing offensive about it. The only thing that ever confused me as a kid was calling folks 'black people', since none of them were black. Until I saw some Original Africans who truly were black-skinned.
"I asked my black roommate in college why you can't say 'coloured people' anymore (which was acceptable ten years prior) and she said she wasn't sure"
The "logic"behind this is that it was considered dehumanising to put anything in front of the "people" part. It's why it became "people of colour." Somehow, black people remained acceptable though. Maybe "people of blackness" was too ridiculous even for the language police.
Others objected to "coloured" because it separated humanity into white people and everybody else. Which is exactly what "BIPOC" does now. Basically, what I'm saying is, you will find no internal logical consistency. It's just people for whom taking offence is a hobby.
Being a gay man who has known friends who were savagely beaten by assailants yelling that word, I will thank you not to use "queer" as anything but the slur that it always has been. I understand that this is a generational division but the point of this blog is the polite exchange of ideas and there is nothing remotely polite in referring to people by what has for most of my life been one of the two ugliest slurs in the American lexicon.
There is nothing proud and nothing liberating about donning the mantle of defectiveness.
In Levans411's defence, the field of academic study, which underpins many of the more insane ideas we're currently facing (and some that are far worse than anything that's yet hit the mainstream), is literally called "Queer Theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory).
I think it's perfectly reasonable to stick to LGBTQ or some variation thereof to talk about people (gay/lesbian/trans etc always work fine for me), but the academics and politics related to the ideology, it's hard to talk about without using their actual names.
But this raises a good point. I think we're reaching a point where I might put together some kind of etiquette guide. The precision of language is super important. And especially as we deal with many sensitive subjects here, we should probably have at least on for two ground rules.
So let me get this straight. You are saying that a university curriculum gives legitimacy to the word? Really? "Allow me to retort."
* Many universities give tenure to supply side economists, teaching a Laffer cocktail napkin model that has a perfect track record of failure
* Physics departments are loaded with string theorists, a cultic group who try to push out other physicists engaged in other research because it's "anti-string." And string theory not only has no experimental support aside from underpinnings in attainable physics that also have a perfect track record of failure.
"Queer theory" comes out of postmodernism, which is again, the most intellectually vapid social model in post-Enlightenment history, little more than neologisms ("heteronormative phallocentricity") and radical egalitarians with weak minds.
Color me unimpressed, Steve.
"So let me get this straight. You are saying that a university curriculum gives legitimacy to the word?"
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's difficult to talk about the field without using its name. If I wanted people to stop legitimising the concept of race, which I do (I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I avoid the use of the word "race" whenever possible, and stick it in scare quotes whenever I need to use it), I'd still have to accept the fact that Critical Race Theory is the name of a significant field of study that is responsible for a number of the ideas we're grappling with today. Same for things like "whiteness studies."
This isn't a university curriculum. It is, as you yourself say, a branch of critical theory that comes out of postmodernism, as most "critical theory" does. I think it's not only stupid but dangerous. That doesn't change the fact that it exists and it will inevitably be necessary to talk about it from time to time.
I've made the effort not to mention it by name at all throughout this comment, but it's cumbersome to say the least. I don't think it's a reasonable expectation for everybody who might come here to discuss the topic. I'm more than happy to ask people not to use the word as a slur. As I am with all slurs. I'm also happy to ask people not to refer to people using the word even when not used as a slur. But the academic theory only has one name. What do you suggest?
"The Study of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" works for me. So it's a few more words, that's preferable to enshrining a vicious slur.
"Race" has never been a slur that I know of.
"Theory" in science means more like "proof" in the vernacular; *atoms* are a "theory." QT is not even at the level of hypothesis and is undeserving of "theory." I'd wager the same is true of CRT.
These are fields of study, not theories.
""The Study of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity" works for me. So it's a few more words, that's preferable to enshrining a vicious slur."
Chris, I sincerely hope you can understand why I'm not going to ask everybody who wants to refer to this established field of study to substitute its name for this. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to your point. I am. But there's no such thing as Ni**er theory. And if there were, I'm as sure as I can be that I wouldn't try to prohibit reference to it. As long as the reference was to the field of study and not to people.
If anybody ever uses that word as a slur here, I'll come down on them like a ton of bricks. In fact, I'll probably just revoke their commenting privileges permanently. If it slips under my radar, please feel free to point it out to me. But I don't think anybody benefits if this turns into a place where intent and context don't matter.
I'm not asking you to enforce anything in referring to that foppish faux-academic bullshit, and I doubt it will ever come up. But I hope you understand why I see it as equivalent to "Ni66er Theory."
Because it is.
The assertion that the word has been "reclaimed" is bullshit. It is as I said; just another extension into offending the "str8s." Except it backfired and now a lot of gay people and hangers-on like the crossdressers and the gender cosplayers are stupidly calling themselves defectives.
Count me out.
And while we're at it, count me out of
* "they" for one person
* target and impact as verbs
* invite and ask as nouns
* unique to mean unusual
* reach out to mean contact or email (verbs)
* moving forward to mean proceed
* share to mean say
And all the rest I can't think of right now because I almost went into a coma this morning
I agree with you. I use the word to describe a younger generation and a different political movement, not my own.
The word no longer means “gay and lesbian”. I know heterosexuals who consider themselves “queer” because they engage in other-then-missionary-style sex. “Queer” now means “I don’t want to be considered old and straight.”
Very different than when I was young and being a lesbian was illegal.
I'm a little surprised at your reaction to it. The LGBTQ community appropriated that word long ago. When you and I were kids, kids called each other 'queer' but it didn't mean homosexuality; it meant someone who was weird, stupid. etc. Adults used the word to describe people who were a little odd or perhaps 'not right in the head'; at some point I think in the early '70s (you might know the history better than I) gay rights activists 'reclaimed' the word and started using it a lot, including for organizational names like Queer Nation.
The 'f' word for gays, I get. It's like the n-word for blacks, the c-word for women. You. Don't. Say. Those. Words.
'Queer' on the other hand doesn't strike me as being offensive, and I know of no one else apart from you now who thinks it is. It's got a fairly nebulous meaning for and even today, I'm *still* not sure what it means when activists use it. I mean, it's what the 'Q' in LGBTQ stands for.
You are wrong.
The adoption of "queer" was a push back at the increasing normalization of gayness, the next step in the confrontational belligerence that so hindered our progress for so long. A lot of radical gays regarded assimilation as the ugliest word in the language and strongly identified with being marginalized in an enclave culture. So they started to call themselves "queer" as just another form of "in your face."
The next generation had never lived through having friends put in the hospital by assailants yelling that beautiful reclaimed word at them, and thought it was normal.
Well, I visited a few of those bashed friends in the hospital and I have no affection for that word. I will thank you not to use it.
As for the Ever Lengthening Acronym, I cut it off after the B. And many will tell you that the Q stands for "questioning" because they know it remains an offensive slur.
They can change what they say the Q means but we all know what it *did* mean. I accept that you really dislike the word and don't want it used to describe others; but I'm not convinced it means only what you say it means. Nor am I sure it really much matters *what* people are yelling at you when they beat you, guaranteed if they're calling you 'Beethoven' while doing it, you will never think the same way about Beethoven again, and probably will never like his music as much as you did before, assuming you ever did.
I'm with you on cutting off the Q, but I don't know about the T. That's been there for awhile, and before transitioning became cool. So, for awhile I think, it referred to the few gender dysphorics or perhaps confused gay men who would understandably be embraced by a group of marginalized people who were a lot less extreme than they are now.
Maybe I'll cut off the Q, because frankly the whole damn long-ass acronym is just silly, and a testament to how self-absorbed and narcissistic the whole movement has become. Not to mention misogynist and anti-lesbian.
Yep, I stop at the T. Q+ is basically straight people who think that threesome they nearly had one time is a personality.
That's good. Or the straight guy who closes his eyes and lets a gay man give him a BJ means he's edgy. Or even bi.
Self-absorbed, narcissistic, and tyrannical. Lists of strident demands, constantly lengthening the list of anathemized words (I don't try to keep up; I still say transvestite and transsexual), orthodoxy-policing, strident, and vain. How many bathrooms is a gas station required to have? A small business?
I've known many dysphoric men, dated two of them, and I probably care more about them than the vain woke crowd does but I also know that their concerns are, beyond support and sympathy, not mine. Both of those I dated have transitioned surgically and are probably married to men. As women.
I think the statistics tell the tale; the great majority of the Ts are fake and are making the claim for attention unless it's a transition to being gay, and if they emerge from that phase missing pieces they were born with, that is horrible.
Edit: I like Beethoven, but not just the Choral Symphony that made Alex go out the window. I like the quartets, the 7th, the chamber sonatas.
To be fair, gay men were pretty misogynistic and anti-lesbian from the get-go. Now the whole movement is.
I stand by the history I recounted. The adoption of "queer" was purely intended to remain offensive in a society that no longer found homosexuality so alarming. My memory of this transition is crystal sharp.
Just as "unique" used to mean singular and now everyone thinks it means distinctive. I tell people what it's supposed to mean and they are completely unfamiliar with the definition.
Same happened to "queer," but you won't find many of us over 50 or so who don't remember what I'm talking about.
There's a common term for the trans tyrants Steve asked me to not use on here. Well, I am making the same request to you.
It's not a word I customarily use so it won't be much of a challenge. But I'm with Steve on the need to use it if you're talking about the school of thought, or the activist group. "Queer Theory" gets a lot of coverage in "Cynical Theories" about the woke left's obsession with critical everything theory so if a thread here breaks out about the book, you'll probably see the theory referenced a lot.
I hope you know I can tell the difference between an externally created name and a deliberate reference to gay people in general.
Yeah, I'm pretty clear on that, and like I said, not a problem because I never refer to them that way anyway...I never thought it was that offensive, I avoided it because I thought it was outdated. Also vague. When they added the Q to LGBT I thought it was redundant too, but though, well, maybe that'll catch all the other Others. Fat farkin' chance, now *everyone's* got to have their own letter just like when they were kids they all had to have their own trophies.
Back when it was only four (there were two Ts for a while as -vestities and -sexuals both wanted top billing, before the monosyllable) a lot of people dutifully permuted the order ... GBLT, BTLG ... and even in the mention on here that ticked me off they were alternated, T/Q. Q/T. That is just so compulsive.
I've never understood even why lesbians don't like being included under "gay." Gay men, gay women, what is the problem.
But that ever-lengthening acronym is just stupid, people of wildly differing interests and goals who have little to do with each other.
Even academic use of the Q word, like the N word is problematic due to their original use as a slur. The same can be said of the other F word associated with "F bashing."
I wonder why the wokies are still using it, then? I thought they were out to trash every conceivable word which could cause offense to anyone anywhere. If the word is *that* bad I'm genuinely surprised they haven't gotten to it yet.
It's not so much that I worry about causing offense to others, it's for me. When I was in Vietnam it was common for people to use the word "gook." It was used in infantry training and staging battalion as part of a dehumanization of the enemy process. Thing is, we were supposed to be there to help the South Vietnamese, we served around ARVN and ROK Marines. They were not the enemy, but there was that word, so natural to everyone.
People just accept it. I try to not let things that are a part of a dehumanization process become normal in my own head. Dehumanization is beyond insult or offensiveness, and it is a poison in our own soul.
I've also never called a woman the "B" word. Calling one a dog in heat is dehumanizing. Maybe that makes it OK to smack her around?
Feminism really went sour fast. It quickly came to the point of a monoculture; there was only one acceptable outlook for women, a man-hating office tyrannical boss in executive drag. And there are women who actually do want something like a more traditional role in their lives, wife homemaker and mother, not because they've been brainwashed into subservience but because they didn't *want* to be an office B. The bitter chin-beard radical feminists excoriated them.
I also got taught that 'Jap' was bad to say even though it was short for Japanese. With WWII still fairly fresh in my mother's head after I was born, she didn't like the way people in her day called people "japs" or worse, 'dirty jap'. It wasn't until high school that I learned what "gerry" was when the word was used in Bye Bye Birdie, the musical I was in. (Once again Mom the WWII Expert helped here). I knew about 'gook' (I think that was common in the Korean War too). I'll use the 'B' word but I avoid the 'C' word. Although I used it in the article I wrote for a feminist website (still not published yet) because I was quoting transwomen who loved to call women transphobic c's on Twitter. Hmmmm....then there's the word 'deplorables'...
I could give a very long list of slang words used for people from different countries, including the European ones. They were common when I was young but not so much now. The stuff I prefer to not normalize in my own head pertains to making it OK to kill or beat the crap out of someone.
The big one came out of making it OK to enslave people. I find it hard to believe that people in their heart of hearts were not aware of the evil of slavery, but they eased their conscience via the dehumanization of the people they enslaved. Yet they knew they were human.
Runaway slave ads gave descriptions that included the talents of the slave to help identify them because they wanted their slave back. Interestingly, those ads that have been preserved give a history counter to that dehumanization. ~He is an accomplished carpenter and black smith. Known to play the fiddle at barn dances. Speaks English and French~ In a society where teaching a slave to read was a crime the description is of an accomplished and talented man. So, he was called a "N". Catch my property and return him to me for a reward.
Shortenings usually end up being slurs but they're inevitable. Japanese —>Jap, Nipponese—>Nip, these are as inevitable as refrigerator—>fridge. But they end up being slurs.
But not Brit--British. Then again, one can turn *anything* into a slur. Haters will pick up on anything and do it because changing the labels doesn't change the minds. Several years ago in a bar, some friends and I tested it out by being bigoted toward each other for totally non-political things. We called each other Pink Shirt and Baseball Cap and and hurled those labels as though they were the n-word. We were in hysterics. It's why I'm not in favour of constantly rendering new neutral words 'offensive'. It's just silly that you can say 'people of colour' now rather than 'coloured people'. I asked my black roommate in college why you can't say 'coloured people' anymore (which was acceptable ten years prior) and she said she wasn't sure, maybe making reference to skin colour at all? Then there's Negro, which is merely the Spanish word for black; yeah, that's where the verboten n-word comes from, but pronounced properly there's nothing offensive about it. The only thing that ever confused me as a kid was calling folks 'black people', since none of them were black. Until I saw some Original Africans who truly were black-skinned.
"I asked my black roommate in college why you can't say 'coloured people' anymore (which was acceptable ten years prior) and she said she wasn't sure"
The "logic"behind this is that it was considered dehumanising to put anything in front of the "people" part. It's why it became "people of colour." Somehow, black people remained acceptable though. Maybe "people of blackness" was too ridiculous even for the language police.
Others objected to "coloured" because it separated humanity into white people and everybody else. Which is exactly what "BIPOC" does now. Basically, what I'm saying is, you will find no internal logical consistency. It's just people for whom taking offence is a hobby.