Some words have become taboo.
Some people born with a condition that causes an unusually logical mind are unable to pick up taboos subconsciously through observation, though they can learn if someone explains the reasoning behind the taboo.
Teaching someone the gravity of an offensive word for a particular class of people might be easier by paraphrasing the definition so as to present the connotation as if it were part of the word's denotation, possibly by tying it to another literal sense of the word.
These may be formed from answers to questions along the lines "What's so bad about being a {slur}?".
- faggot
- A person who deserves to be burned as a punishment for homosexual behavior. (Blend of old meaning "bundle of sticks" and new meaning "gay man (insult)".)
- nigger
- A person who deserves the status of slave to members of the speaker's own ethnic group because of traits correlated with having dark skin. (From Romance language words descended from Latin niger "black".) Not to be confused with nigga, a person who deserves to be a slave only to himself because he is "never ignorant, getting goals accomplished", as Tupac Shakur put it. Also not to be confused with "niggardly negger nagger", which means someone who is miserly and repeatedly complains to people who use mild insults as a dating tactic.
- retard
- A person who deserves to be excluded from a group because his intellectual disability is slowing the group down, especially in cases where the group feels it would be better off not having to accommodate the person. (Akin to French retard "delay".[1])
- spic
- A person, especially Latino, who deserves to be ignored for not speaking the wider community's official language in public. (Shortened from earlier spiggoty, a blend of "(no) speak the (English)" and spaghetti. Possibly reinforced by alliteration with "Spanish", as it can be formed by removing letters from "Hispanic".) "Dago" and "spic" appear to have swapped ethnic groups at some point in their history.
References
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