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mōdgethanc wrote:Another word where slight differences in grammar make a big difference in meaning is the word "queer" which I brought up in my last post. Saying someone is queer, meaning LGBT+, sounds neutral to me and most of my age group; it would be normal in my social circles to use the word this way without batting an eye. But saying someone is "a queer" is something only bigots would say. When using it for more than one person, "they're queer" seems fine, but pluralizing it like "they're queers" also feels kind of suss. In this case it's, interestingly, the exact opposite of "Jew" in that it's fine as an adjective but it should not be used as a noun.
Linguaphile wrote:Sometimes these come from well-intentioned ignorance such as having heard others use the same terms and adopting them innocently, but they can and are also used to be deliberately offensive and/or to emphasize "otherness". Sometimes the intention to use the words as an insult is most obvious from the way they are said, a certain over-emphasis on the word in question (or in the case of the mispronounced words, a certain over-emphasis on the mispronounced syllables). I'm not sure I'm explaining that well but if you've heard it before you know what I mean.
Linguaphile wrote:Similar situations that I am personally familiar with are a town with a large Punjabi-speaking immigrant community where "Indian" is actually one of the nicer things people call the community (but same situation: if all the Indian people in the community speak Punjabi, why not learn that it is called Punjabi?
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