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Comment by sacnoradhq | Hacker News Reader

Fashions will change and fade, and find fault with every word like grasping at straws to find something to be offended over.

I'm sorry, that term is now racist: grasping at threads.

I'm sorry, that term is now sexist: grasping at leaves.

Ad infinium.

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I believe a large fraction of the words they label offensive were previously replacements for other words considered offensive.

The need for express the category doesn't go away with the word, so new words replace the category, and banning the word does nothing to the underlying category

Best seen with the transformation of terms around disability, where even transformations as late as differently abled are now derogatory and to be avoided.

I had that very thought reading the entry for "abort". so what happens when we nuke that word? "I've had a cancellation". well, now we're calling it that, and the argument is now about that, and round and round we go.

I'm not against changing how we use language, but perhaps there are deeper issues that could be dealt with to avoid having to retcon our dictionary in the first place.

besides the nature of offensivene of language come with intent, people are perfectly able to come up with mean sentences out of menial words (your brain is as big as a pea) all the while if you go to a supermarket in spain all dark chocholate is hard r n-word and life goes on as normal.

we kinda have lost the plot when calling out people for being intentionally disrespectful became calling out any form of language that the disrespectful people used, in a form of guilty-by-association game.

if we could be back calling out specific instances of offensiveness and evaluate it case by case it be grand. it doesn't scale, but justice never was intended to be scalable -by design-

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Euphemism%20...

Relevant: George Carlin on euphemisms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

'Frequently, over time, euphemisms themselves become taboo words, through the linguistic process of semantic change known as pejoration, which University of Oregon linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor dubbed the "euphemism cycle" in 1974, also frequently referred to as the "euphemism treadmill"'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism

We just have to up the pejoration rate so much that the euphemism cycle is so short that they stop attempting to police it

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