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Comment by rthomas6 | Hacker News Reader

>are not offensive.

How exactly is "off the reservation" not offensive in the way that several commonly used idioms are now considered offensive, such as "that is retarded", "that is gay", "you Jewed the price down", "I got gypped"?

>are not offensive.

Right, literally nobody takes offense to "off the reservation" because you of course don't mean Native Americans. Are you seriously saying that slightly racist terms are only ever offensive in literal contexts?

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Only one of those is universally considered offensive. One is a recently-manufactured "outrage" that only the terminally-gullible actually find offensive (i.e. folks best described by exactly that adjective). I've never heard of anyone actually taking racially-based offense to the fourth one there, outside of a dumb joke on a bad sitcom 15 years ago, and even then they were faking it.

Do you live in a place with a substantial Roma population? Because every Roma person I've met finds the fourth phrase racist. The rest are pretty universally known as offensive, and there's easy substitutes, so why use something that's going to cause offense when you can make the same exact same points 100 different ways?

http://www.r-word.org/

http://psychologybenefits.org/2014/02/07/anti-lgbt-microaggr...

> One is a recently-manufactured "outrage" that only the terminally-gullible actually find offensive (i.e. folks best described by exactly that adjective).

I can't even tell if you're referring to "retarded" or "gay" here.

I think "gay" is offensive only because it refers to a widely recognized social reality that is still being fought out, the reality that gay people are socially inferior, and that gay bashing is a social art for men.

Take away that reality and "that's gay" becomes an idiom lost in time.

"Gay" as a general synonym for "undesirable" is obviously offensive to gays.

Would you consider someone calling you stupid offensive?

I think "retarded" is what is being referred to. It doesn't make any sense to call the terminally-gullible "gay".

Yeah, but the backlash against using "retarded" as a slur is barely noticed as an issue, which makes it sound like he's referring to "gay".

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