Warning: I'm not sure how to formulate that properly, I hope no-one gets offended to much. I think one of the worst thinks you can do is to be afraid of a word

Warning: I'm not sure how to formulate that properly, I hope no-one gets offended to much. I think one of the worst thinks you can do is to be afraid of a word itself. But that's exactly where it has come to. It often seems that just pronouncing the n* word or spelling it out is highly offensive. But IMHO this is super bad for the people who are offended. If there is a problem you should speak about it and this include pronouncing and spelling the offensive word. If you don't you are only helping the people which use that word as a insult and a denouncement. You are now at risk of feeling offended or even threatend from just hearing the word even if it's not directed at you , not used as the insult and maybe you misheard (like above). Demonizing a word when it's the contextual usage of the word which is the problem isn't really helping anyone I believe. Don't get me wrong using the word to insult, denounce or describe an person is an absolute no-go and as far as I can tell should stay that way. But when you speak about e.g. how someone breached that no-go and how that is not ok you shouldn't be afraid to use that word instead. And yes I'm not using the word here because I know how people can be offended by it. Still fear the abuse of words but don't fear words itself or the fear might just eat you up. (Abuse as n* originally only described someone from Nigeria, like Berlin => BerlinER with some shortening. But yes this doesn't matter anymore at all and might sometimes even be used to downplay the insult which is not ok.)