Should I be worried about being offensive? Why?

[Loddfafner]

I vaguely recall an essay by a black Lesbian contrasting her vocally homophobic brother who respects her as a person and backs her up as kin to a feminist who hides her discomfort behind perfect politically correct language but treats her not as a person but as a specimen of political correctness, like an insect on a pin.

[Electronic God-Man]

This strand of feminism depends on an extreme form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the belief that language directly shapes thought. Postmodernist discourse analysis adds the dimension that obscure etymological origins of words contributes to their impact.

Yes. This is exactly what we were talking about. We even read an essay by Whorf directly before getting into the Ross piece.

[Loddfafner]

Those PC harpies would confine the oppressed to carefully-policed happy-word preserves rather than toughening them up to function in the real world. They contribute to the marginalization of the "oppressed" while repeating slogans about empowerment.

Words ultimately do matter: as tools of communication. The Sapir-Whorfians should be charged with linguistic treason for degrading our language with so many euphemisms we cannot speak up any more.

[Psychonaut]

This strand of feminism depends on an extreme form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Hah! You beat me to it! I studied Sapir and Whorf in college, but never really got behind the idea that artificial changes made to the way you speak could have the same kind of effect on your thought process as do the linguistic foundations of your native language. It also seemed, from their research, that the particular linguistic instances that most strongly influence thought (like the time example using Chinese) were based on structure and grammar rather than vocabulary.

Regarding the original question, I think it depends on your personal ethics. Nietzschean uebermenschen offend whoever the fuck they want. Kantian deontologists are generally unoffensive. Jamesean pragmatists do a cost benefit analysis when they want to be offensive.

[The Khagan]

Feminists are some of the most self righteous, pretentious idiots on the planet.

And for some reason they all unanimously decide to give false etymologies for awesome words. Had a feminist speaker and she give a false etymology of the word "cunt." Said it came from Latin. I had to interject, I'm sure I made everyone in the room feel slightly dirtier.

EDIT: On false etymologies and oppression. I just read loddfather's posts, thank you! I've always knew there was an actual concrete definition for something like this.

[Electronic God-Man]

Regarding the original question, I think it depends on your personal ethics. Nietzschean uebermenschen offend whoever the fuck they want. Kantian deontologists are generally unoffensive. Jamesean pragmatists do a cost benefit analysis when they want to be offensive.

I'm feeling pretty Übermensch.

[Loddfafner]

And for some reason they all unanimously decide to give false etymologies for awesome words.

Then you get Mary Daly, who made up lots of words to fill her books (ie Gyn/Ecology) so readers would stop thinking in "patriarchal" terms. She may of persuaded her readers to stop thinking period.

[Electronic God-Man]

Then you get Mary Daly, who made up lots of words to fill her books (ie Gyn/Ecology) so readers would stop thinking in "patriarchal" terms. She may of persuaded her readers to stop thinking period.

LOL. What a cunt! We read some of her stuff too. Did she come up with "HerStory"?

She died just recently. She didn't allow men in her classroom and our prof tried to explain that sometimes women don't want to say things in front of men and it helps if they can just be taught separately.

My first thought: I think you're on to something! Let's have a race class with whites only...I bet you'll get a whole different picture then.

[The Khagan]

Then you get Mary Daly, who made up lots of words to fill her books (ie Gyn/Ecology) so readers would stop thinking in "patriarchal" terms. She may of persuaded her readers to stop thinking period.

There's a great deal of subjectivity when it comes to "offensiveness."

People who are offended by words are the culprit of making a word offensive in the first place. It's a fluid and dynamic, completely mutable and subject to an individual and current mob mentality.

The "offendees" are essentially trivializing a group just as much as the "offenders."

[Poltergeist]

Some people here are confounding the topic of whether or not someone is allowed to be "offensive" with the topic of whether vulgarity is to be tolerated and how much. Two totally different things.

As for offending, it's hard to tell. If some people pretend to have some "right to be offensive", then they have to admit the possibility that the offended ones can "offend them back", in retaliation. What I experienced more than once is that many self-styled Nietzschean uebermenschen who think they can offend anyone they like, usually cry like little babies when offended back by those towards whom they were "offensive" in the first place.