Let’s not limited the context of its usage to one ethnic group.  It comes off as if you are old school and out the loop if you get me.  Nevertheless, I frequent the area urban parks, and I can assure you, that those youth younger than I am is throwing it around.

I have to say, though, that it’s disappointing that it’s evidently a-okay to use well-known disability slurs here.  Folks with low IQ or other noticeable disabilities have a long history of those terms being associated with abuse that parallels the reasons we don’t use the n-word.  Even if we assume nobody with a low IQ is reading, their parents/siblings & people with the other impairments are — plus, using it casually legitimizes/encourages those that use it as a slur.

I don’t think that it’d be a huge difficulty to have a blanket policy covering those slurs, if bans/filters (rather than leading by example) is what BB admin prefers.  We even saw the writer that covered the Swiss athlete being ejected from the Olympics impose the ban upon himself by using alternatives to the r-word; it shouldn’t be much harder to manage with other slurs (or alternately to handle them the same way the other slurs are, e.g. leading by example).

(Seriously, pick an instance and explain why you don’t think it is somehow about racism.  It always is.)

This is why the ironic usage doesn’t pass easily to whites like Quentin Tarantino or Gwynnth Paltrow – because they are still evoking a context in which they are privileged and others are not.   That pesky original meaning never actually changed.

That and the ones in hotels never have batteries.

How is it silly to argue that sometimes “n****r” is not a slur because of context?  When rappers use it to describe themselves, don’t we assume that they are NOT being racist?  

Let’s look at the wikipedia definition of pragmatics, shall we?

“Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context CONTRIBUTES TO meaning. Pragmatics encompassesspeech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the transmission of meaning depends NOT ONLY only on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. grammar, lexicon etc.) of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and so on.[2]”

Emphases mine, obviously. Nowhere is the claim made that meaning is entirely dependent on context, but only that context can modify it in interesting ways. Which I would not deny.

It’s just silly to insist that, as the original poster did, “n****r” is not a slur because black folks use it, and sillier to argue that sometimes it ain’t because context. Even when reappropriated, it is actually a slur – it retains some of its original connotations. There’s no happy, sunshiney usage of the n-word that doesn’t evoke a background of oppression and low social status.

My point in claiming that “masturbatory shitstain” was my new term of affection for BB commentators was to illustrate the near impossibility of stripping words of their immediate connotations.

No, it’s really not.  Language is a social thing.  The whole point is that the meaning of an utterance (as opposed to the meaning of a word) is NOT determined singlehandedly by one person, even if that person writes a dictionary.

I would tell you to google “pragmatics”, but given that you think that believing that language is a social construct makes one a “masturbatory shitstain” means that this conversation can’t really go any further.

So yeah, you’ve got two scenarios.

non-black person puts it in there -> it was probably intended to shock and seriously offend

black person puts it in there -> this is more like putting “hey asshole” in, still intended to, in the very least, surprise and annoy.  (We’ll just ignore the fact that the word is usually spelled differently when used this way, which cuts down the odds of this scenario significantly.)

Either way, it doesn’t belong in there.  Either way it’s not exactly interesting news, either.  (Reminds me of those “somebody grabbed the PA and said the N-word” stories that were popping up a few years ago.)

The post title should be changed to be more accurate.

The answers to these questions should explain your disingenuous (and/or ignorant) BS.

Please expand on how often you look to young men and women that you don’t know to model good social behavior for you?

assigning bad names to all the TV channels is the first thing I do when I find myself bored in a motel room
very childish, I know

You see, you’re implying that they’re being hypocritical. That if they are going to use abusive & oppressive language amongst each other, they simply have to accept that they’re employing a ‘double standard’ by preventing the Privileged from using them.

It also ignores the fact that, from within Marginalized Groups, discourses around abusive language are actually not simple and there are many divided and varied opinions
on the subject. Treating Marginalized People like a hive mind is always a great way to further subtly insult them and since the point of this entire debacle is to come out with as many notches on your belt as possible, you want to make sure you slip in as many knocks below their belt as you can manage.

http://www.derailingfordummies.com/complete.html#playfair

Also, unfortunate mixups happens. Facebook’s counting DAUs. Lots of Germans wonder if that says something about Facebook’s opinion about their users.