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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I was just reading this article about how a long-time NYT worker was fired, because, when he was acting as a guide/chaperone for a student field trip, one of the students asked him a question about someone else hypothetically saying a racial slur, the NYT employee pronounced the slur in question - and for this, he was fired.

That seems outrageous to me. Even more outrageous that some/most of the other employees seem to support and advocate for the firing. I'm glad people are blocking the NYT. I hope it fails or changes.

https://freebeacon.com/issues/inside-the-grey-ladys-meltdown...

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As a non-American, the intellectual infantilization around bad words is completely insane to me.

Please don't add nationalistic flamewar on top of ideological flamewar. That's going the wrong way down a one-way street.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm an European and i strongly feel like this cultural issue is coming from the anglosphere.

I'm totally in for discussing this, if you dont like it about nationality, then make it about culture/language?

In Germany, Sweden, and Norway it certainly exists as well. These countries even have laws enforcing such taboos. Good call @dang

No, at least in Germany the laws depend on the context. You can't use a racial slur to insult someone, but pronouncing it to talk about the word with students would be perfectly allowed (and how else could you explain to them that they shouldn't use a word, if you can't even pronounce it? Wait till they hear it somewhere else and repeat it?).

The question here is not what's "allowed" - saying nigger is allowed in the US if you're talking about the law. The question here is about the most extreme social reactions.

I guess an equivalent might be what'd happen if a well known persona started wearing a toothbrush moustache. It's not illegal (presumably!). Would it create retaliation, sure.

That's not true. You can use any racial slur in Germany to describe said slur. The laws only ever apply to insults, which have to be directed at someone. There's no "N-word" equivalent where people talk about a specific word but then somehow don't say it.

You are making the same mistake like the people i was lamenting about - equating the 'bad' word with its use as insult.

The words are not regulated by law as you suggest, but insults are.

Regional flamewar isn't any good either :) But there are ways of talking about these things that don't involve flamebait and name-calling. If one reads the site guidelines and takes the intended spirit of curious conversation to heart, that goes a long way. Note this one:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

and this one:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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