Unmasking Slurs
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=33789 [languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu]
2017-07-25 15:55
Vulgarities rely for their effect on a systematic hypocrisy: we officially stigmatize them in order to preserve their force when they are used transgressively. (Learning to swear involves both being told to avoid the words and hearing them used, ideally by the same people.) But that’s exactly the effect that we want to avoid with slurs: we don’t want their utterers to experience the flush of guilty pleasure or the sense of complicity that comes of violating a rule of propriety