We Know It’s a Slur

I’ve been thinking about slurs.

Which is not something teenage me would’ve reflected on, mostly because teenage me was busy using them like commas.

I grew up in a time and place where the R-word was just… air. It was said about people, about broken stuff, about bad traffic, about printers that wouldn’t print. Nobody whispered it. Nobody questioned it. It was just there. And since no one around me was “PC,” I wasn’t either. I said it hundreds of times without so much as a moral speed bump.

Then one day, years later, while I was attempting college, I casually dropped the word near a speech therapist.

I would like to formally announce:
That was a terrible room for that experiment.

She stopped me — not explosively, not performatively — just calmly and directly. And she explained exactly why that word was harmful, who it was tied to, and why intent doesn’t magically erase impact. No public shaming. No social media tribunal. Just information.

And unfortunately… it worked.

Because once someone clearly explains the harm behind a word — and you actually listen — you don’t really get to pretend you’re confused about it ever again.

Then there’s the other part of my linguistic résumé I’d rather redact.

As a kid, we called guys “gay” as an insult.
We tossed around the F-word like it was seasoning.
None of us thought about who was listening.
None of us thought about who we might become.

Later in life… those same words were thrown at me.

With accuracy.
With malice.
With better aim than I preferred.

It’s wild how suddenly words develop meaning when they’re pointed at your chest.

And that’s the thing. The words didn’t evolve.
I did.

People love to argue about slurs like it’s a philosophy dissertation. Definitions. Context. Intent. Free speech. Technicalities. Flow charts. Footnotes.

But honestly, there’s a very simple test that saves a lot of time:

If you would use a word as an insult toward someone who isn’t even that thing… you already know it’s a slur.

Because the insult only “works” if the identity itself is being framed as inferior.

You’re not questioning behavior.
You’re not critiquing choices.
You’re just dragging an entire group of people into your punchline who didn’t even sign up to be there.

And despite all the arguing we do online…

Everybody knows before they say a slur.

They feel the tiny pause.
The internal “Should I?”
The micro-second of awareness where the weight of the word goes click.

Then they decide whether to respect it… or swing it anyway.

That’s not confusion.
That’s a choice.

Growth, unfortunately, is realizing how many of our “normal” words were built out of someone else’s humiliation.

And maturity is learning you can reroute your vocabulary without your personality flatlining.

I don’t pretend I wasn’t raised in it.
I don’t pretend I never said it.
But I do pretend I don’t need it.

Turns out the English language is shockingly robust.
We have thousands of perfectly good insults that don’t require stepping on entire communities to work.