Event Detail

It’s a platitude that words can harm. But some are more prone to do so than others—they are pejorative by design. Among those, slurs are particularly inflammatory: they derogate purely on the basis of group membership, for example, on the basis of race, ethnicity, origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or ideology. They are powerful linguistic weapons: slurring someone constitutes a transgression more severe than an insult; it is an act of bigotry, not mere rudeness, derogating the entire group at once. Moreover, the offensive effect of a slur is surprisingly sticky, as even mere mentionings of slurs carry the risk of triggering their sting, so much so that such tokenings often have a full-on taboo status, subject to media censorship, sometimes even legislation.

What is the source of this characteristic offensive sting that makes slurs such powerful linguistic weapons? A natural—and predominant—assumption is that it’s some aspect of their meaning, semantically encoded or pragmatically conveyed. However, even those who reject this majority position trace the offensive sting down to slurring words, arguing that it is their taboo status, or offensive tone, that explains their sting. In this talk, I argue this is a mistake: the pejorative effect of slurs, their characteristic sting, is not a matter of meaning, nor even language.