Words are presumed to carry power, especially words that offend people. The very idea that a word can “offend” someone depends on an imagined or assumed structure of power. When a term is labeled a slur, it is usually because it is thought to emerge from, reinforce, or call into being some underlying social hierarchy. For example, there are words that black people can use to describe white people that technically qualify as slurs, yet very few white people are seriously offended by them. There is a presumption that whites hold structural power over blacks and thus their words do not injure. Moreover, whites deserve to suffer slurs since they are the oppressors. The presumed asymmetry of power flows in one direction, and that presumption shapes how the words operate. (Do you see the paradox?)
In the opposite direction, there are words that white people can use toward black people that are deeply hurtful. The assumption is that such words express or invoke a position of power, and that they carry within them the weight of a larger social asymmetry. At the same time, black people may use these same words among themselves and often argue that this usage strips the words of their oppressive power—an act of rhetorically “reclaiming” language from the dominant group.
We see a similar dynamic in words directed at gay people: slurs aimed at gay men or lesbians wound deeply, while parallel slurs thrown at straight people land with far less force. Yet accusations of homophobia, like accusations of racism, can be hurtful because they charge the accused with moral wrongdoing. In that sense, the equivalent offense on one side is the use of a derogatory term; on the other side, it is the accusation that the person is morally tainted for supposedly using or embodying a derogatory attitude that manifests the asymmetry of power.
Over time, some words become so heavily charged that even referencing them without malice becomes taboo. The power dynamic is so baked in that people avoid speaking the word outright and instead reduce it to constructions like “the N-word” or “the F-word.” Yet, everyone who hears the euphemism instantly imagines the actual word in their mind. Even the people who would be offended if they heard the word mentally summon it the moment the euphemism appears. It is in everybody’s head (or else we wouldn’t know what was being conveyed). The taboo becomes paradoxical: the word is forbidden to speak, but impossible not to think.
This dynamic is on my mind today because of the controversy surrounding the word “retarded,” now frequently replaced by “the R-word.” When I was growing up in the early 1960s, words like “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron” were understood as synonyms for retarded. Yet today retarded alone has taken on the status of a sacred or forbidden term. It resembles, in a way, the ancient Jewish taboo against vocalizing the actual name of God; instead, one used circumlocutions. Only priests or scribes could speak the divine name. This taboo was built on the assumption of an asymmetrical power relation between the clerical class and ordinary people. Similarly, our modern panel of offensive words functions as a set of secularized sacred terms—words that cannot be uttered because of the social power they are imagined to reveal.
Thus, what we call “offensive language” is really a structure of sacred language embedded within an imagined system of power. This is what postmodern philosophers describe as discursive formation: the idea that language does not so much reflect power as generate and organize it. If one is to have power, one must control language (yet another paradox). While the term is modern, the underlying phenomenon is ancient. Civilizations long before ours used regulated language—taboos, sacred terms, forbidden names—to enforce and perpetuate structures of power. In that sense, nothing about our current landscape of forbidden words is new. The observation is simply that we have reinvented an old form of linguistic sacredness under secular conditions.
When I was growing up in church, I learned something about power that I now see as parallel. I often heard it said that the devil—Satan—has only the power that God allows him. If we imagined Satan as possessing independent, self-generated power, a kind of standalone evil deity, then Judaism and Christianity would be polytheistic rather than monotheistic. But the theology I heard insisted that God alone is sovereign and that anything Satan does occurs only within limits established by God (see the story of Job).
Years ago, during a debate on CNN’s Crossfire between Frank Zappa and a guest—likely someone associated with the Moral Majority, since it occurred during their campaign to ban or label certain song lyrics—Zappa repeatedly emphasized that lyrics are simply “words,” nothing more than letters arranged in a particular order to convey an idea.
Zappa, a well-known atheist, approached the issue from a perspective I share. My objection to any theological system that forbids certain words from being spoken—what is traditionally called blasphemy—has always been strong. I find the creation and exercise of such power offensive. Here, I am not using “offensive” in the sense of hurtful words; rather, I find it offensive when systems restrict people’s freedom to speak. I find it offensive because it is illiberal and totalitarian.
The theological concept of blasphemy has been secularized: the same logic now governs prohibited social words, where uttering them—especially depending on who speaks—can trigger sanctions. This phenomenon shatters the illusion of presumed power. The real power structure is revealed when people find themselves on the disciplinary end of this linguistic control system. This is a situation of inequality; liberty is manifest when everybody enjoys equal access to words to express their thoughts.
It takes a lot of courage, I know, but we should collectively refuse to participate in a system that punishes people for uttering words and should actively work to dismantle such punitive mechanisms. It is not as if we don’t have the tools to wage this fight. The First Amendment to the US Constitution can be understood as a recognition that power structures have historically used punishment for certain forms of speech as a tool of authoritarian control. The Framers rebelled against that power. To allow a system of linguistic control is fundamentally at odds with the free and open society envisioned in American jurisprudence.
freedom and reason 