Not sure if that is directed to me or not but to be clear on my position, my answer would be no.
The word remains inoffensive in the USA and offensive in Australia. Neither side has the right to decide for the other how to use it or perceive it.
Sorry, I mean to direct that at @Mijin
I think you did but I wasn’t absolutely sure.
edit, when I replied you just then it doesn’t even look like I’m replying to you. Not sure why that is.
How do you mean?
I click on “reply” on your post but when my post pops up it doesn’t mention you anywhere on it. There’s nothing to indicate it is in response to you.
That’s weird. When I’m replying to you it has your name in the top left corner of the pop-up.
(The place where you can decide whether to start a new thread or send a PM or reply as normal.)
Not for me, unless I’m quoting someone directly there’s nothing at all to indicate that I’m responding to a specific person. I thought it was like that for everyone and a quirk of the board software. It isn’t just my replies either, I often have to check for context to see who is replying to who.
I’ve just realised that I don’t even know what you mean by the “pop up” I just click on the “reply” arrow at the bottom right. there aren’t any other options
This is what I see while replying. If you click on the arrow in front of the name, you get a dropdown list with the reply options I mentioned:
But afterwards this is what I see:
This is because CodingHorror, in his infinite wisdom, has decreed that replies to the post directly above should not display the little reply-to arrow thingy; presumably in order to keep everyone confused as to whether it is a reply to the post above, or a general reply to the thread.
Ah! I understand now and looking back through the thread I can see incidences of replies that do indeed include the persons name.
Yeah, I think that is a bad stylistic choice. Consistency is to be preferred. The person you are replying to should always be in the post.
I agree. I can see the argument for disappearing the quoted text when you quote the post directly above, but there is no reason not to display the arrow.
However, CH did create the highlight-text-and-click-quote functionality, which makes it so much easier to do partial quoting than VBulletin or anything else I use. Best thing about Discourse IMHO.
Try either quoting a few words (or more, but not quite all) of the post being replied to, or addressing the person you’re answering by name.
I guess those are workarounds for an individual but it doesn’t help if not everyone does so. Be nice if the “replying to” tag was applied as a default.
There are two separate concepts in your question, so let’s be clear about this.
What I was actually talking about was what it means when a word is considered “offensive”.
For a word to be considered offensive by e.g. dictionaries, it only needs to offend some non trivial number of people, some of the time. That’s it.
It doesn’t need to offend all the people, all the time, which would be a ridiculous standard to meet.
Think of it like a concept like “dangerous”. For an item to be considered dangerous enough to have a warning label, it only needs to be dangerous in some “within reason” scenario. Not all scenarios.
(OTOH, if an item is explicitly labelled as not dangerous, the implication is that there is no significant risk of injury in any within reason scenario, otherwise why say that?).
Now, that’s whether a word is offensive. The second issue is when we recommend against using a word.
Not only have I not said a word should be immediately struck as soon as it’s deemed offensive, but I even gave an example of a word (“stupid”) which I think should still be fine to use.
In your example I think that anyone communicating to an audience likely to include a non trivial number of Australians should be considerate and not use the word. If the word is particularly strong in Australia (eg like the N word), then I’d recommend cutting it in general.
Seems like maybe your disagreement with @Novelty_Bobble is merely a semantic one, then. If you can agree on how to deal with words that are offensive within some groups but not others, does it really matter what you call them?
My own way of dealing with it is for each party to consider it for themselves on a case-by-case basis.
The offended party should not assume that what they are offended by should no longer be used.
Though I do have one question. What if it’s a foreign word that happens to sound like an offensive term in another language. Should people speaking that language stop using it, or at least avoid saying it while visiting or living in countries where it’s offensive?
I assume my list is slightly different from your list. But we all know that we judge people based on how they choose to express themselves. If someone chooses to insult other people using slurs, i think less of them. I suspect you so, too, based on your own internal list.
Well it’s nuanced and I don’t claim to be the all knowing sage on how words should be handled.
I can give a concrete example though. In Chinese, the word 那个 is pronounced in many dialects just like the N word in English.
Now, 那个, is perhaps the most common word in Chinese because it’s actually used as a filler word (an equivalent in English would be “like”). There’s no way in hell the word can be scrubbed.
But yes, when traveling in the West with Chinese friends I give them a heads up, and they are usually careful about using this filler.
I may be alone on this but the fact that people are choosing to direct personal insults at people in the first place is more important than the words they choose to do it with.
You’re not alone on this.