Slurs, Stereotypes and Insults
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Slurs, Stereotypes and Insults Eleonora Orlando 1
& Andrés
Saab 1
Received: 8 July 2019 / Accepted: 27 January 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper is about paradigmatic slurs, i.e. expressions that are prima facie associated with the expression of a contemptuous attitude concerning a group of people identified in terms of its origin or descent (‘spic’), race (‘nigger’), sexual orientation (‘faggot’), ethnia or religion (‘kike’), gender (‘whore’), etc. Our purpose is twofold: (i) explaining their expressive meaning dimension in terms of a version of stereotype semantics and (ii) analysing their original and most typical uses as insults, which will be called with a neologism ‘insultive’, in terms of a speech act theory. Keywords Expressive meaning . Slurs . Stereotypes . Speech act theory
This paper is about paradigmatic slurs, i.e., expressions that are prima facie associated with the expression of a contemptuous attitude concerning a group of people identified in terms of its origin or descent (‘spic’), race (‘nigger’), sexual orientation (‘faggot’), ethnia or religion (‘kike’), gender (‘whore’), etc.1 Our purpose is twofold: (i) explaining their expressive meaning dimension in terms of a version of stereotype semantics and (ii) analysing their original and most typical uses as insults, which will be called with a neologism ‘insultive’, in terms of a speech act theory. Therefore, in the first section, we argue for a conception of the expressive meaning of slurs as culturally determined evaluative stereotypes. In the second section, we put forward an account of their insultive uses by appealing to some central concepts of classical pragmatics. An We put together what Jeshion (2013b) calls ‘group-referring’ (‘commie’, ‘T-bagger’, ‘faggot’, ‘dyke’) and ‘personal’ (‘fatso’, ‘druggie’, ‘whore’, ‘wino’, ‘pimp’) slurring terms because we think that there is no significant difference between them: in both cases, there is prima facie a group of people that is the target of a contemptuous attitude.
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* Eleonora Orlando [email protected] Andrés Saab [email protected]
1
National Research Council (CONICET), University of Buenos Aires, Bulnes 642 (1176), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Orlando E., Saab A.
important clarification is in order: we intend to cover not all the group slurs that are in use in the different linguistic communities but just the most paradigmatic ones, which serve to entrench the well-known racist, sexist and homophobic attitudes and practices that help to keep in place unequal social structures all over the world. We then conclude that paradigmatic slurs like the ones initially mentioned are semantically linked to evaluative stereotypes and typically (but not always) used to insult people (both belonging and not belonging in the target group).2
1 Expressive Meanings as Stereotypes 1.1 Dualist or Hybrid Semantics It is convenient to start off by making it explicit that the proposal belongs in the approach inspired by Kaplan (1999), according to which certain expressio
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