[Dig1t]

OP’s words exactly:

>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that

Making a point of trying to shame other people for using words you don’t like is a losing game in the long run.

The “actions have consequences” argument is what lead us to where we are now where you can see an obvious backlash.

Heck the papa John’s pizza guy got fired for using a magic word in an obviously non-derogatory way, and it was the same “actions have consequences” mentality even though basically nobody would be genuinely offended by his usage of it.

If you continue to make a big deal out of every usage of gay and retarded those words will only grow in power and popularity because you are showing someone that they have the power to get you to freak out if they use them.

You can see the opposite effect with traditional swear words, which are so used in popular media that they have lost almost all of their power.

[mjmsmith]

Do you think that racial slurs will lose their power if people stop objecting to their use?

[codyb]

Ah yes... sixth graders and human adults have so much in common.

In fact, the culture at the school changed, and people stopped saying gay so much. It was very cool.

You should try standing up for something you believe in sometime, maybe you'd like it.

[nemo]

Out of curiosity, what about calling someone a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, etc.? Are those all fine too and better to just put out there so no one is, I guess, disempowered? Should we let everyone throw around racist and hateful slurs casually, and also label people using them with the traditional labels for those who engage in that kind of behavior?

[Dig1t]

Those words you listed are an example of exactly what I’m talking about. Words like Nazi, bigot, etc have lost most of their power now because they have been used so much. 5-10 years ago those labels could ruin your life and people in the US would trip over themselves to prove how those labels didn’t apply to them. Now a great number of young people don’t care at all about being labeled as those things, and being labeled as one of those things is much less likely to ruin one’s life/career.

[nemo]

That is some impressively convoluted doublethink. Good luck straightening your head out someday.

[Dig1t]

I’m just saying that words have the power they are given by people. If you don’t want to be offended by a special word you then just don’t give it the power to hurt you.

“Queer” is another example. It used to be a slur, gay people decided collectively that they were going to take the word back, and it worked. Go ahead and call someone queer as a slur in San Francisco, it doesn’t really work the same as if you had called someone queer in the Midwest in 1990.

It’s not doublethink, it’s a provable phenomenon.

[xundb]

Not a great example, as many gay people, including myself, still consider it to be a slur.

Many of the people who have supposedly took it back and use it to describe themselves aren't even gay.