> I used to think that words were just words, logical things with defined meanings. Well, they are! But those defined meanings are different for everybody who

> I used to think that words were just words, logical things with defined meanings. Well, they are! But those defined meanings are different for everybody who has a history with the word, and oftentimes you don't know that history going in. The problem with "straight white male" privilege, speaking as a straight white male myself, is that there are words which have enormous baggage for one group or another, yet I've simply never had to deal with such baggage myself. That's where the overreacting canard comes from, and I don't think raganwald fully empathizes with this in his post. Some people simply don't understand why somebody might have a reason to be worked up about a particular issue because they've never had to care about that issue in their life. I don't just hear "you're overreacting" from people who can't comprehend that people have bad days sometimes. In fact, assuming that the only reason a situation might be personally charged is because somebody had a bad day can be just as frustrating: it really sucks, I've learned, to be "forgiven" for your bad mood when the forgiver has said something truly offensive. What's difficult, but also truly necessary, is to be able to understand why somebody's reacted the way they have – to be willing to admit to yourself that even if something you said didn't seem egregious to you, that you might have crossed a line somehow that you simply haven't learned to notice. A lot of people forget that in any human-to-human interaction, the logical endpoints are the humans. Language, as all aspects of communication, is human-oriented; using it like it's a logical end unto itself is like trying to use Python phrases in a C script.