Course Reflection [Arthur Toland-Barber]

I think the papers about slurs made me consider language differently more than naming conventions. I have always known that slurs were offensive but I haven’t considered why or for what reasons. My base idea was that they didn’t show respect toward the people they referred to (which is also the case), but through these last few papers I found that there was more to slurs than I originally thought. Interesting cases like quotations exist which seem to prove that slurs have a separate linguistic category than other words since despite a supposed neutral aspect, still invoke a reaction. They are also a category of words which seem to have a sense of uselessness (unwarranted perhaps is a better term) to them, which also makes them unique. In short, slurs are more complicated than I thought and these papers have shown me that.