| > It is, to its very roots, a bad word. Even if every single human being using it was meant to be insulting, it still wouldn't make it a bad word. Because there are no bad words. Just like there are no bad numbers or bad colors or bad images. Information can't be good or bad. It has no such property. A message becomes offensive only when its sender said it with the intention to be offensive. And the same message could be offensive in one case and not be offensive in others. Context matters. > They are not trying to get people to say "r-word" instead of the r-word. They want people to be more thoughtful and stop using the term altogether. It doesn't work like that. There will always be a word for mentally ill people. And there always will be some asshole who will try to use it against anybody who he doesn't like. Then it becomes derogatory. And it starts all over again. They ("r-word campaign") will just change one word with another word (and burn a bunch of books containing the old word in the process). They will never change how people think. Well, actually... you can remove all negative words from the language like it was suggested by George Orwell in 1984 novel [1]. Then "bad people" will have no words to express what they're thinking. But I really hope you aren't intending to go that way. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak |
The idea that that works seems to depend on linguistic determinism, which is far from established.