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Comment by deciplex | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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".

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...

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