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In an emotionally-charged situation, it's easy to forget that curse words have an actual meaning other than being an insult. In the situation where your views
by kd5bjo 9y ago
In an emotionally-charged situation, it's easy to forget that curse words have an actual meaning other than being an insult. In the situation where your views on what's acceptable have changed, like Latty described, you can slip into old verbal habits pretty easily without realizing it.
- sangnoir 9y ago> In the situation where your views on what's acceptable have changed, like Latty described, you can slip into old verbal habits pretty easily without realizing it. I fully agree, however, I think that's just your views slipping out. You might not want to be that way, but you are that way, possibly because of how you were raised or some other factor you didn't have control over. Saying "that is not a true reflection of who I really am" seems ingenious to me.
- Latty 9y agoExcept I didn't (and still don't, of course) hold any negative views about gay people. I'll make the same analogy as I did in my other comment - people use "dumb" to mean stupid all of the time. Do those people harbour subconscious anti-mute sentiments, or are they just picking a word that they think of as meaning "stupid"? Likewise, at the time, I could have replaced "fag" with "dick" with no qualms at the time. It was an insult, and it's meaning didn't matter to me. (Until I was reminded of it's meaning and harm I was causing, which made me stop using it). I guess I'd describe it as - I'd become desensitized to the meaning of the term and used it not expecting it to cause any harm. You can say that surely it's obvious that it causes harm, but it wasn't obvious to me until the described moment that I was propagating this negative idea of homosexuality. When I did notice that, I stopped.