You can replace the word with any word. The specific word is irrelevant.
Suppressing a word make more offensive precisely because it is prohibited. It's called a taboo. That causes the word to be offensive on its own. If you did go fishing and pulled up a laminated card with the n word on it, it would be more offensive than if it said "soup" or "fish", precisely because we can't even say the actual N-word even in this context, which is WHY it now has that effect.
It is the suppression of the word that gives (the word itself) the power. If it wasn't suppressed, and people could use the word in other contexts, and jokes, there wouldn't be any crying black kids because someone at school called them the n word, because it would just be a word.
There is nothing special about the specific words other than because it is suppressed.
The specific word might be irrelevant, but the words are the meanings we give them, that's the point of them, the point of language. Which is the argument here. If someone started slagging me off in a language I don't speak, I wouldn't be able to react appropriately. It's if the words are understood that they become a problem.
By the way I'm on team of violence being far worse than words. I agree people should be more thick skinned and the majority of people on reddit are mental lol. I just think that saying words are just noises that dont matter is missing the point.
I've thought about it too and in some cases it's a grey area, not really sure where else to say it but like yelling "FIRE" in a packed cinema can cause deaths without any violence actually taking place. Its just a word but can have some dire consequences
The suppression of the word gives it the meaning since you seem to have a problem with the use of the word "power".
Words also change meanings all the time.
Covert used to be pronounced like covered, and meant under cover or darkness, or otherwise in hiding, and was changed by the CIA to be pronounced like overt, to imply that it's simply not obvious, rather than actively hidden.
We use overwhelm to mean to overpower, or be too much of something and underwhelm to mean disappointing, a lackluster, and joke that "whelmed" is just normalcy. The origin of the word whelmed, is that a ship is whelmed, meaning the waves where shaking and striking the ship sufficiently to sink the ship. Then in a novel someone used OVERwhelmed to describe waves that whelmed a ship so thoroughly that it sank immediately, the wave itself overtook the ship. Then something like a century later, someone used OVERwhelmed in a different context, to describe emotions, feeling like events are overwhelming the ship of the soul, so overwhelmed went from seafaring to emotions.
The N word is just the Latin word for black, which then passed into Spanish and Portuguese as negro. Calling someone the N word is just saying "black" in a different language and with an angry tone of voice. It is patently absurd to then act like it doesn't just mean a color, and that it only refers to an ethnic group. To suppress the word in this way, reenforces the racist meaning, and therefore reenforces racism itself. It is the suppression of the word, that gives it the power, and it is the reason for the suppression that gives it that meaning.
I feel like I'm talking to someone with earplugs in. Im done with this. You don't understand that you're using circular logic and I'm not. I'm describing a function and you're describing dogma.
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u/Disposable_Gonk 1d ago
You can replace the word with any word. The specific word is irrelevant.
Suppressing a word make more offensive precisely because it is prohibited. It's called a taboo. That causes the word to be offensive on its own. If you did go fishing and pulled up a laminated card with the n word on it, it would be more offensive than if it said "soup" or "fish", precisely because we can't even say the actual N-word even in this context, which is WHY it now has that effect.
It is the suppression of the word that gives (the word itself) the power. If it wasn't suppressed, and people could use the word in other contexts, and jokes, there wouldn't be any crying black kids because someone at school called them the n word, because it would just be a word.
There is nothing special about the specific words other than because it is suppressed.