yes, Greer is arguing something else.....I'll give you that...and I've actually never heard or read her argument....but I was just adding weight to the playing with language theme
as for when you say 'using gay to insult someone simultaneously insults gays....', I feel a bit unwell
yes, it works in the case of gays (if that's what their official and natural name is) but you can't say 'Using mong to insult someone simultaneously insults mongs...'.
Mongs are not mentally disabled people. Niggers are not black people. The linkage that these words made in the past should be attacked in every way in today's world. The insulting power of these words can be divorced from their original meanings.
As for the gay word, I personally dislike it being used as an insult, and its similar to when a man is called a girl, or he throws like a girl. This doesn't mean that a word cannot diverge into two distinct usages, which may well happen with the word gay, but I think that such a development is more difficult than words like mong and nigger and invalid and moron and ....
I would back up my argument that a word can be a powerful insult without referring to its original meaning and social act by providing some examples of words we use today as insults but that have no conscious or unconscious relation to its original meaning, but I can't be arsed to do the research.
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:12, Share, Reply)
Shut up Bert, or Ernie, or whatever. You're like The Guardian, wrong about everything, all of the time.
(, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:31, Share, Reply)
This is a really good thread and I want to read through what you linked
but I'd definitely disagree with the "Mongs are not mentally disabled people. Nigger's are not black people." part.
Those words do pick out sets of people, and it's very clear what set of people they pick out. Being slurs, there's an additional chunk of meaning carried along with their denotation, which is information about the speaker's attitudes towards the referent (and maybe the listener as well).
There's a real lack of good work on the linguistic properties of slurs, at least in part because of how hard it is to come up with tests that probe people's linguistic intuitions without dragging in their feelings about the world.
If you took out a picture of different ethnic groups and told people to circle all of the chinks or something, they might not do any circling because they don't share the implicit attitude that's packed into the slur's meaning, but it doesn't mean they don't know what group of people it refers to. In fact, if you didn't know what people the slur referred to, it would be harder to recognize that it was offensive to begin with.
It's a bit like giving someone a true or false test with sentences like "Albert Einstein, the horrid bell end that he was, was born in the German Empire."
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the prick of misery pierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Tue 16 Sep 2014, 23:57,
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No. This is not a really good thread. Next you'll be telling us that Bill Hicks was the greatest comedian that ever lived. Funny is funny. Cunts are cunts. Funny can be rude and offensive. But rude and offensive does not equal funny.
(, Wed 17 Sep 2014, 0:04, Share, Reply)
I definitely agree that things that are rude aren't automatically funny, if that's all you're saying.
But if a guy gets famous while saying homophobic and misogynistic stuff, and loads of people laugh at it and pay money to see it all the time, I think you're better off trying to figure out why that can happen than just asserting that it isn't funny after all.
Telling people that something's offensive just makes it more funny when a famous guy gets up on stage and gets away with telling jokes about it to his audience. I don't like it, but I'm pretty sure that's the point of those kinds of jokes.
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the prick of misery pierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Wed 17 Sep 2014, 0:45,
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re: the last bit of your post *Bono alert*
I think you're totally right.
I know someone who was interviewed back when the FFC was trying to decide whether Bono was describing a sexual act when he said "really, really fucking brilliant" at the 2003 Golden Globe awards.
I think he makes a pretty good case that "fucking" as an intensifier isn't referring to sex stuff.
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=801
I think you could probably show the same thing with a number of insults, but not all of them.
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the prick of misery pierced my foot on a spiiiike on, Wed 17 Sep 2014, 0:28,
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