[mlyle]

On the one hand, you're not trying to make people lesser...

On the other hand, it's interesting we do this over and over again (pejoration). Innocent words associated with disadvantaged groups start to become derogatory, are mostly abandoned from polite use to describe people in that group, but then become okay to cast around casually in other contexts.

[techdragon]

The euphemism treadmill strikes again.

It’s a linguistic process that has been academically studied and is surprisingly straightforward once you have it laid out in front of you it’s basically “once we acknowledge word as bad, people use new_word so they can be bad without other people knowing it yet”

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

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

[mlyle]

Good mention of the euphemism treadmill. But even without euphemisms....

"Lame," "retarded," etc.-- they were direct (non-euphemistic) words describing attributes. But because they're associated with marginalized groups, they quickly become derogatory (and euphemisms to the extent that they could express negative judgment on other things: "Fortnite is lame").

In the end, language expresses who we are: even the negative aspects of us.