Yes, those things are insulting to the people who belong to that group. There’s an entire style of joke where the setup and punchline is “what are you, ____?” And when the person responds yes, the original speaker is chagrined. Almost like inferring that someone is lesser because they have different capabilities is a shitty thing to do. Who’d’ve guessed?
But really the only difference between these and slurs is impact. Those groups that are impacted are the ones who decide if they’re slurs.
Well… not really. It’s the zeitgeist that really decides the difference between the two. Some group gets a little too shitty with using a word as an insult and it can expand into a cultural slur. I mean, that’s how the Euphemism Treadmill operates. Some word is determined to be naughty by the zeitgeist, so the group that was using the naughty word switches to another word, implying it has the same meaning, which just adds another word to the naughty list. Sometimes words that were naughty stop being naughty because people stopped being shitty with them. It’s the way of living languages, railing against it just makes you seem childish at best.
And I didn’t say shit about “moron”. Keep up, please.
Yes, those things are insulting to the people who belong to that group. There’s an entire style of joke where the setup and punchline is “what are you, ____?” And when the person responds yes, the original speaker is chagrined. Almost like inferring that someone is lesser because they have different capabilities is a shitty thing to do. Who’d’ve guessed?
But really the only difference between these and slurs is impact. Those groups that are impacted are the ones who decide if they’re slurs.
Well… not really. It’s the zeitgeist that really decides the difference between the two. Some group gets a little too shitty with using a word as an insult and it can expand into a cultural slur. I mean, that’s how the Euphemism Treadmill operates. Some word is determined to be naughty by the zeitgeist, so the group that was using the naughty word switches to another word, implying it has the same meaning, which just adds another word to the naughty list. Sometimes words that were naughty stop being naughty because people stopped being shitty with them. It’s the way of living languages, railing against it just makes you seem childish at best.
And I didn’t say shit about “moron”. Keep up, please.