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Comment by laichzeit0 | Hacker News Reader

"In a high school soccer game I was called 'a white man with a [horrific racial expletive deleted] name.'"

Horrific racial expletive. That seems a bit... excessive? Let's elevate the horrificness of this word to the point where if someone utters it they get fined or jailed. That should teach 'em.

People are so ultra-politically correct these days I'm too scared to open my mouth for fear of offending someone, saying something sexist, racist, "white male privileged", not fat-accepting enough, etc. It's becoming insufferable.

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The placeholder was chosen in the context of a relatively personal, informal group blog:

http://thepoetryquestion.com/about/

If you think your sexist, racist, white male privileged, fat shaming thoughts are important to voice, I don't see why you would worry about them offending someone.

The motions of political correctness can go too far, but the basic thought, to consider what words might mean to someone else, is a reasonable thing to do if a person wants to communicate effectively.

The fact that somebody can't write nigger destroys the flow of the article and wrongfully elevates the word. It's just a word, stop giving it power.

This type of hyped up placeholder is _exactly_ an example of political correctness gone too far. It's exaggeration. My argument is not even against purposefully using words that are offense. It's about how there are so many words that are deemed offensive today that I can't even keep track of what they are.

For example, calling one of my own non-homosexual friends a "faggot" or "gay" is offensive. Even though I'm not homophobic and personally find it to be a funny, playful insult.

I may or may not be factually correct about this, but in general (I use the word general here in the sense of more than 50%) of those offended seem to be minority groups. I.e. homosexual, African Americans (this is easily to confirm by census results in a country), Semitic groups, etc.

The issue seems to be whether we should give up the ideal of not offending people as there exists no such fundamental right not to be offended.

It would be too far for NPR to be doing it, without understanding the audience of the blog, I think it is harder to say.

I don't think that not offending people is an ideal anyway, it is just usually (or maybe just often) the reasonable course of action.

> For example, calling one of my own non-homosexual friends a "faggot" or "gay" is offensive. Even though I'm not homophobic and personally find it to be a funny, playful insult.

Um... if you don't have anything against homosexuality then why would you use it as an insult? How is this logical? It shouldn't have anything to do with "not offending people". The real question is "What are you actually communicating?"

Casual use of slurs shows at least a certain amount of unthinking disdain for others if not actual malice. Censoring referential or quoted uses of slurs may be an over-correction but the intent is not to appear disdainful or malicious.

You can say whatever you want, forget about "political correctness" or "offending someone", but expect people to respond to what you're actually communicating (ignorance and disdain at best).

Well, for instance, when I'm calling someone a faggot, I'm thinking about what is typically called a "queen" in gay-lingo. Like an overly effeminate homosexual. I happen to find their behaviour and mannerisms to be funny and I have no problem with them whatsoever. Calling one of my friends a faggot is funny to me because I'm drawing an analogy between their behaviour and queenish behaviour.

The point is that I find it funny, for my own personal reasons. But someone else may find it offensive, for their own personal reasons, however now my freedom of speaking this way becomes limited because of the potential for someone else to find it offensive.

Going back to the original post about the author inserting ".. [horrific racial expletive deleted]" into post. I find this type of reaction to only further the agenda of limiting people from speaking freely by falsely implying that certain words may not be used because they are likely to offend. Whether they offend or not should never be a criterion for limiting the use of a word.

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