I don't know why you would insist on using a term that you know will offend others. Personality disorder?
"Fuck" will offend others. But it's one of the most used words in the English language. Words like "vomit" and "feces" will offend some people... Should we not use those, also? Some people are just very easily offended. Maybe we should all just stop communicating entirely, so that we won't risk offending anyone, ever.
Would snide casual talk of a similar nature about women / blacks / etc be acceptable in the same place, PC or not? No. And for good reason.
I call Bullshit. Day in and day out I hear people refer to friends & coworkers "bitch" -- and no one gets offended. It's all about context, something you appear to lack.
I'm sorry but no. Words don't have a different meaning just because you want them to. You can't call someone a "child molester" just because you want "child molester" to mean "liar", "ignorant" or anything else.
Yes, actually, you can.... The point of language is to communicate. If you choose to use these words this way, as long as the person you use them with agrees on the meaning and understands what you mean, then they do in fact mean that, and you are still communicating effectively.
Words and their meanings don't magically appear in our brains; they come to mean what they mean only after someone has used them. Do you suppose "onion" has always referred to the buttocks? Here's a hint: no, it hasn't. But do you understand when people use it that way? I can't remember when the last time used the term in my presence when it wasn't understood, so I assume you do. I wonder how that happened...
...I have to call you out for using "gay" as a pejorative here. If you think it's stupid, call it that. If you think it's idiotic, call it that. If you think it's bad branding, say so. But don't call it "gay" for the same reason you wouldn't call it a "n*****" name.
It's the nature of language to evolve; words mean what you use them to mean. Many words have more than one meaning, and gay is one of those. For years, "gay" has been colloquially used to mean, roughly, "silly in a lame way." Some people instead use the word "ghey" to reflect this idea, to disconnect its use from the use of gay to mean homosexual.
Use of the word "nigger" is not comparable, AFAIK; it has never been in common use for any other meaning than as a pejorative for dark-skinned people of African origin.
Even downloading movies, which we tend to think of as a more victimless crime, means that for every dollar saved by someone watching a movie for free in their dorm room, the shortfall has to be made up by paying ticket buyers.
I find this statement to be utterly false. The movie industry releases hundreds of movies per year; some of the movies do hundreds of millions of dollars in business, some do at most a few million dollars, or even less. So how do you define "shortfall" as used above? The movie industry (and apparently the contributor) apparently assume that anyone who downloads a movie illegally would have been willing to pay $10 to see it legally, if downloading it were not an option. If you downloaded 200 movies over a month's time (or even a few months time), that's $2,000 worth of movie tickets... How many people are really willing to spend that much on movie tickets, in a month or even a few months? How many college students watching illegally downloaded movies in their dorm room have $2,000 a month/semester/whatever to spend on movie tickets? Or for that matter, time to watch them? The idea that every illegally downloaded movie represents a shortfall to the movie industry is absolutely absurd.
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry
