Inflammatory Language

Abstract

It’s a platitude that words can harm. But some words are more prone to do so than others; they are pejorative by design. Among those, slurs are particularly inflammatory: these are the epithets that derogate purely on the basis of group membership (e.g., on the basis of race, ethnicity, origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or ideology). This book is in large part about pejoratives, but mainly about this subclass of particularly inflammatory words, with a characteristic offensive sting—slurs. Slurs are powerful linguistic weapons: slurring someone constitutes a transgression more severe than an insult—an act of bigotry, not mere rudeness, derogating the entire group at once. Moreover, the offensive effect of a slur is surprisingly sticky—even mere mentions of slurs carry the risk of triggering their sting, so much so that such tokenings often have a full-on taboo status, subject to media censorship, sometimes even legislation. What is the source of this characteristic offensive sting that makes slurs such powerful linguistic weapons? A natural—and predominant—assumption is that it’s some aspect of their meaning—semantically encoded or pragmatically conveyed. Consequently, most efforts at understanding slurs have been attempts to characterize their meanings and how they compose with those of other expressions, in a way that generates the offensive sting. But even those who reject this majority position trace the offensive sting down to slurring words, arguing that it’s their taboo status, or pejorative tone, that explains their sting. We argue this is a mistake; the distinctive pejorative effect of slurs—their characteristic sting—is not a matter of meaning, nor even language.