Should I be worried about being offensive? Why?

[Electronic God-Man]

I suppose this is some sort of moral question.

I just got back from a philosophy class. The topic was language. One of the assigned readings was How Words Hurt by Stephanie Ross, a radical feminist who teaches at the University of Missouri. The article made some ridiculous claims about how we should not use words such as "fuck" or "screw".

To fuck comes from Latin fustis meaning "a staff or cudgel" and/or Celtic buc a meaning "a point, to pierce" according to Ross. I'll wait for Osweo to tell me if she was right or not about that. She writes this about the verb to screw:

A screw is hard and sharp; wood by contrast is soft and yielding; force is applied to make a screw penetrate wood; a screw can be unscrewed and reused but wood -- wherever a screw has been embedded in it -- is destroyed forever. When the verb to screw is used to describe sexual intercourse, it carries with it images of dominance and destruction.

Apparently we shouldn't use these words because they will cause some sort of "harm" to women, "an oppressed group."

I sat there and listened to my fellow classmates debate back and forth about when a word is or is not offensive. We even got into terms like "holy cow" (supposedly a mockery of the Hindu veneration of cows) and "to gip" (from Roma Gypsies). A large contingent of the class felt that these terms were offensive and shouldn't be used if anyone really knows the etymology and how they came into common speech. We even got into things like "this sucks!" and "this blows!"

Anyway, the whole time while they all were talking about not wanting to be offensive and "harm" anybody I couldn't stop thinking that honestly I don't really care about being offensive to someone else. Who the fuck (oops!) cares if some Hindu takes offense when someone says "Holy Cow!" or if a Gypsy gets offended when I say I've just been gipped. I feel like it all revolves around this victim status that apparently applies to everyone but "white males". I was disappointed to see a bunch of these white girls in the class describing themselves as oppressed all of a sudden once we got on the feminist stuff. I think this victim status is...weak. And pathetic.

So that's just been a long roundabout way of getting to my question:
Should I be worried about being offensive and why?

On one hand, I should be worried about offending someone if...well, if I don't want to offend them. On the other hand, I'm a big believer in saying what you mean and what you feel. If my best friend is being an ass I should call him an ass and he should be offended. That was the point.

But our discussion today was waaay beyond that. We're talking more along the lines of saying "offensive" things and even if the people around are not offended then we are still causing some sort of harm. For instance, the "holy cow" example. Only one person in the room knew what it was really referring to, so clearly no one was offended when he first said it...but now that we all knew we were supposed to just consider it offensive from now on. What is more, by using the phrase, regardless of whether or not we realized its origins we were furthering some sort of ongoing slur against Hindus.

I walked away from it all thinking "I don't give a fuck!"...Is that a problem?

[The Lawspeaker]

No. Feminism is pretty much screwing up Western civilization so I don't see why you should give a fuck...


Disclaimer: still.. if you want to have any kind of sucess with the ladies. Avoiding using those- and similar- words though.

[Electronic God-Man]

I also found something the professor said quite amusing. She told another student that had he made an anti-semitic joke she, being a Jew, would not be offended...to which she added "because I think that Jews are far superior, but maybe I should be offended because it is hurtful to the Jewish people."



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[Electronic God-Man]

No. Feminism is pretty much screwing up Western civilization so I don't see why you should give a fuck...


Disclaimer: still.. if you want to have any kind of sucess with the ladies. Avoiding using those- and similar- words though.

Yeah, but beyond feminism...should I be worried about offending anyone unless it is somehow detrimental to me or a relationship I hope to have or maintain with a person for instance.

[The Lawspeaker]

Yeah, but beyond feminism...should I be worried about offending anyone unless it is somehow detrimental to me or a relationship I hope to have or maintain with a person for instance.

I personally think that (if it does not harm your relationship/friendships/family bonds) you should be open and honest about what you think about certain issues and avoid consensus and political correctness.

And if other people would feel insulted. Then the problem is theirs and not yours as they are just being narrow-minded.

[Beorn]

You should have told that cock deprived fucking Jew bitch whore that her dirty cunt mouth offended you as a man of Anglo-Saxon descent.

Anglo-Saxon

An Anglo-Saxon charter[4][5] granted by Offa, king of Mercia, dated AD 772, granting land at Bexhill, Sussex to a bishop, includes this text in a mixture of Anglo-Saxon language and Latin:

Þonne syndon þa gauolland þas utlandes into Bexlea in hiis locis qui appellantur hiis nominibus: on Berna hornan .iii. hida, on Wyrtlesham .i., on Ibbanhyrste .i., on Croghyrste .viii., on Hrigce .i., on Gyllingan .ii., on Fuccerham 7 and on Blacanbrocan .i., on Ikelesham .iii.; Then the tax-lands of the outland belonging to Bexley are in these places which are called by these names: at Barnhorne 3 hides, at Wyrtlesham [Worsham farm near Bexhill ] 1, at Ibbanhyrst 1, at Crowhurst 8, at (Rye? The ridge north of Hastings?) 1, at Gillingham 2, at Fuccerham and at Blackbrook [may be Black Brooks in Westfield village just north of Hastings ] 1, at Icklesham 3.

The placename Fuccerham looks like either "the home (hām) of the fucker or fuckers" or "the enclosed pasture (hamm) of the fucker or fuckers", who may have been a once-notorious man, or a locally well-known stud male animal, or a group of such, or something unrelated.[citation needed]

[Electronic God-Man]

I personally think that (if it does not harm your relationship/friendships/family bonds) you should be open and honest about what you think about certain issues and avoid consensus and political correctness.

Yeah, I agree.

And if other people would feel insulted. Then the problem is theirs and not yours as they are just being narrow-minded.

Well, here's the thing. Several times throughout the class I felt impelled to just say "Listen, I see no reason to give a damn about offending someone else." but I figure that the response would have been that I am somehow immoral....

Does that make me immoral? How could I defend just not giving a fuck if a Hindu takes offense to me saying "holy cow!" or even straight-up calling him a "dot-head"?

[Electronic God-Man]

You should have told that cock deprived fucking Jew bitch whore that her dirty cunt mouth offended you as a man of Anglo-Saxon descent.

Trust me. These sorts of things only want me to be more incredibly and blatantly offensive. I considered just offending everydamnbody in the room, but I'm sure I would have been kicked out of school.

[Loddfafner]

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.

Counter-arguments might start from attacking these premises. The fact that many people can think in shapes or images, and then fumble for the words to express them, immediately refutes them.

What you see there is an academic cult in which those who buy into it stay int he cult while those that don't steer clear of it, leaving the cultists protected from challenge. One consequence of these pseudoscientific beliefs is that it enables a culture of identifying with what offends them and bonding by lovingly polishing the chips on each other's shoulders until they find some new reason to be offended.

They increasingly rip each other apart over increasingly obscure "forms of oppression". It does not help that they tend to elevate PMS-derived impulses to important matters of principle. If radical feminist philosophers were to be released on a desert island, the consequences would be much more brutal than anything in The Lord of the Flies once their cycles become synchronized.

[Baron Samedi]

I don't think you should worry about what modern society thinks about anything.

Look around you.... Do you actually "care" what they think?