| I agree with you that the idea of living your life cowering in fear of offending everyone you meet is ridiculous on its face. It's equally ridiculous to expect that you can impose your standards on everyone around you, and to think you are justified in becoming outraged at every offense. Do you really think that's what's going on here? I see it differently. Being polite is often about self-imposed constraints. We constrain our actions and our language as a sign of respect. Do we do it for everyone? No. But we do it for people we care to show respect to. In the United States, after the Civil War, lynching primarily existed as a tool by which white mobs terrorized non-white communities into social and political subservience, by murdering people. By one measure, three-quarters of lynching victims were black, when only 12% of the population was black. In parts of the old south-west, lynching was part of a successful ethnic-cleansing effort to expel Mexican landowners from lands that white settlers wanted for themselves. Take a look at some of the pictures, read some of the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States This violent history hits hard when you identify with the victims, when those victims resemble your grandparents and great-grandparents, when you know that your grandparents and great-grandparents were also subject to painful repression within the same cultural and historical context. The word has a different energy. I didn't take your use of thee word literally. I used the word "non-metaphorical" in my original comment because I wanted to flag that I understood you used the term metaphorically. There are some words, in some contexts that are offensive when used metaphorically. Just to be clear, I'm not offended by you, nor do I think you are intolerant. I just thought that the word you used in the way you used it was offensive enough given the context to say something about it. If you didn't have a sense before of how the word might be taken as offensive in the way that you used it, now you do. Do what you will with that information. Good luck. |