Content Warning: This article references slurs and pejorative terms, some of which are used without redaction to illustrate the cycle of language reclamation over time.
Today’s article is about reclaimed language and who can use it. Sorry, that first line is very redundant given the title of the article. There’s no idiomatic wordplay today. What you see is what you get. Exactly what it says on the tin. This is part of the larger Shelf Life mission to help writers understand aspects of writing from the editorial or publishing side of things, particular those aspects that might be opaque or esoteric.
As always, this article doesn’t exist to boss you around. You do not have to take the suggestions herein to heart. Obviously. You can be and do whatever you want. When I write these, it is to try to help others understand why certain writing guidance or suggestions exist, why agents and publishers are looking for or requesting certain things, why development or copyeditors might suggest changes to your manuscript.
The subject of reclaimed language is touchy because it contains a couple of tenets that people don’t like, one of them being sometimes things aren’t for you. People hate to hear that there’s a word that some people can use without being problematic but other people cannot use without being problematic. Isn’t that an inequality? An inequitable situation? If a word is pejorative, if it’s a slur, and it’s bad enough that some of us understand that we can never, ever use it, doesn’t that mean that no one should ever use it?
We’ll begin at the beginning, with the other tenet that people don’t like. I must lead with this although it is as uncomfortable as it is true. Please take a moment to prepare yourself and then read on.
Speech sounds do not have inherent meaning.
Or, as Thor said in Infinity War (2018), “All words are made up.” Hear ye, and heed, this blessed himbo’s righteous declaration. Words only mean things because the people who share a common language agree on what they mean. They have no inherent meaning outside of that framework.
And that means—here comes the part that people really hate—the meaning of words changes over time. This is called semantic shift, it’s a well-documented phenomenon, I did not invent this to make a point. Over time, many words change meaning and this happens for a wide variety of reasons.
For example, the original definition of the word nonplussed was to be taken aback, or perplexed, in response to something. The word comes from a Latin root and took this original meaning from the sense that one could not (non) continue (plus) because of one’s state of bafflement or bewilderment.
Mid-twentieth century, speakers of English in the United States began to interpret this word another way—to mean the exact opposite of its previous recorded definition, to be unphased or unaffected by something. It’s as though people suddenly decided that to be plussed was to be surprised or taken aback, and so to be nonplussed meant to be not in that state.
So this is where someone who is a pedant can come in and say, “Well obviously those people are wrong because the dictionary says nonplussed means something other than the way they are using it.”
Well actually, the dictionary is not the arbiter of how language is used. The dictionary is a record of how language is used, and it’s frozen in time at the moment of its publication or latest update. The actual arbiter of what is correct in how a language is used and what words mean is the body of speakers of that language and not some dusty old book. And that is why if you go to Merriam Webster right now and look up nonplussed you will see it has a secondary definition that contradicts its original meaning.
That’s an example of one semantic shift that happened over time for a sociocultural reason. There are lots of other reasons words change meaning or change form. There’s a whole phenomenon of written phrases changing from multiple words (eg, “breast feeding”) to a hyphenate (“breast-feeding”) to a single word (“breastfeeding”) over time as they become more and more commonly used.
All the above is to establish as an understood fact that word meanings change over time and this doesn’t mean that the old meaning was wrong or that the new meaning is wrong, it just means that a semantic shift occurred.
Sometimes a word starts out its life as a descriptive term for a type of person or a group of people. At the time when it is coined, the word may or may not* be used in a pejorative way. Sometimes these words are truly merely a description. For instance, right now when someone has one of many conditions that are part of the Autism spectrum we say they are “Autistic” or “on the spectrum,” and that is considered appropriate and respectful language. It simply expresses that this person experiences a condition that falls on the Autism spectrum. In one hundred years, will this still be the respectful descriptive way to refer to these folks? There’s no way to know.
I am going to use a slur without redaction in the following paragraph.
The term retard comes from the Latin tardus meaning slow. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it entered medical usage to describe people with intellectual disabilities. At that time, that use was not pejorative and was meant to indicate that an individual’s intellectual development was delayed or slowed. Ironically, it came into use to replace three previous, specific classifications of intellectual disability:
Idiot, meaning someone with the intellectual development of a two-year-old child.
Imbecile, someone with the intellectual development of a seven-year-old child.
Moron, someone with the intellectual development of a twelve-year-old child.
As an FYI, when we call someone an idiot, an imbecile, or a moron, we are referencing people with developmental disabilities and using terms for them as pejoratives, not merely conveying that we think someone “is not smart,” although that’s how many of us today think of those words. (You can find a helpful history of these terms here.)
Anyway, toward the end of the nineteenth century, people realized that these terms were pejorative as they had been taken up into the vernacular to insult someone as unschooled or unintelligent. That’s how mental retardation ended up being brought in as a more respectful and non-pejorative alternative term.
Over time, mental retardation began to be used pejoratively with the term r*tard becoming a slur. This word didn’t start out inherently bad. English speakers coopting it for use as an insult turned it into a pejorative term and then ultimately a slur, and it’s now been retired from use and we’re saying individuals with intellectual disabilities.
If you used the r-word for its proper, psychological/medical use in the 1980s does that mean you’re a bad person? No. If you’ve been using it recently as a pejorative because you’d never heard this was a word we stopped using, does that make you a bad person? I don’t think it does. If you have this information and you continue to use the word because you’ve always used it and you don’t see why you should change now? At this point, I think you might want to reconsider your decisions.
That, in a nutshell, is how words go from descriptive to pejorative to slurs. That’s semantic shift. The important takeaway from that process is that the speakers of a language associate negative qualities with the people these terms describe, and begin to use these terms as insults for people outside of those groups:
I want to tell my friend I think he’s being stupid, so I’m going to call him a word that means someone who has an intellectual disability.
I think this woman looks very masculine, so I’m going to take a term that refers to lesbians and apply it to her to insult her appearance.
Sometimes we use terms that are slurs without knowing it, even meaning them in a positive way. Referring to one’s personal bohemian style as having a g*psy aesthetic. Telling a cute kid all bundled up in a heavy coat and hat that they look like an *skimo. Even if we mean these things in a positive way, because we admire the group of people they describe, if the words come from a pejorative background they are still slurs.
Most important part: The person who uses a term to describe a group of people does not decide whether or not the term is a pejorative or a slur. Only the community being described by the term decides that.
One more hint: If an oppressor or a colonizer (I mean a society or culture, not an individual) assigns a term to a group of people they have colonized or oppressed that is not the term those people use for themselves, that term is always suspect. It might not be a slur, or it might have once been a slur and has since been reclaimed, but always give it a moment of consideration.
Now: What does it mean when a word is reclaimed?
Semantic shift can occur back in the other direction with enough time. Reclamation, also called reappropriation, is when a group of people takes back something that has been used against them for their own use. This process is empowering for communities that have been marginalized and words can, in time, be reclaimed to the point where their pejorative use is reversed and they are associated with positive qualities, or at least become neutralized.
That is the goal: Take a word that has been used against you, claim it for your own use, use it in ways that have powerful positive connotations, until the pejorative connotation is replaced with a positive connotation in the overall language, at which point you may keep it for your community’s own exclusive use or the rehabilitated word gets released back into the language at large.
A great example of this is the word Queer. See how I don’t even have to put an asterisk in it? Queer has been reclaimed to the point that non-Queer people may now refer to the community of LGBTQIA+ individuals as “the Queer community” and it’s okay to do, although some individuals who are older than me have told me they feel icky using Queer because it was used as an insult during their lifetime. And that’s fine! You don’t have to use it if it makes you feel icky. The important thing is you can.
Queer entered the English language meaning something that was peculiar or odd. In the late nineteenth century, it began to be used as a term to mean a person who was gay, and specifically for gay men. For about a hundred years it was used as a derogatory term by the non-Queer (hetero) community to describe members of the Queer community, but within the Queer community the term queer was already being reappropriated. People outside the community were using it as a term of derision, whereas people within the community were using it as an ironic self-description.
During the 1980s and 1990s, queer made a comeback as people within the Queer community began to self-describe as Queer publicly. Where once people had used this term quietly within the community, it began to be used in an outward-facing way, where hetero people could hear it.
As social views toward the LGBTQIA+ community changed over time, and the term queer continued to be associated with that group of people, the word came to have positive associations instead of pejorative ones. Today, it’s not unusual for hetero people to use the term queer respectfully when describing people who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. Keep in mind, though, there were multiple decades during which the Queer community was using this term for themselves before it became comfortable enough for the hetero community to begin using it for them.
A litmus test: Could you use queer to insult someone if you wanted to? I mean, you could try. I am a part of the Queer community (a cisgender bisexual woman) and if someone tried to insult me with the word queer I’m not sure I would even understand what they were trying to get at.
I hope I have successfully addressed the two biggest items on the reclaimed language FAQs, which are, “How do words go from neutral to pejorative back to neutral and even to positive?” and “If a word is pejorative or a slur, why should anyone use it instead of just retiring it from all use forever?”
Last item, then, is this: How can you tell when it’s okay to use a word that is, or was, or could be, a slur or a pejorative term? How do you know when it’s been fully reclaimed to the point that you can use it openly (like Queer), or how can you know when it’s okay to use in certain contexts?
I have a friend who is transgender who told me they would be comfortable with me using a pejorative slang term for them (rhymes with granny) because they felt that our relationship was such that I would only ever use it in a loving way and that they’re actually in process of reclaiming the term and they enjoy being called that term. This does not mean that I have been granted some kind of ally card by the transgender community and now it’s okay for me to use this term with anyone. It means that individual and I have a relationship where they have expressed that it would be okay for them if I used the term in that context.
As a rule, if you belong to a community that has used a slur or pejorative term for another group of people—even if you personally never used it yourself!—you should proceed with extreme caution or just dismiss the word from your vocabulary altogether.
If you are a white person in the United States, there are a lot of slurs for people of other races and ethnicities. Even if you never used those words yourself, they have historically been weaponized (and some are still being weaponized) by the community of white Americans generally and that means that you, as an individual member of that community, should probably not use the term.
If you do not belong to the community against whom a term has been weaponized, proceed with caution if you are someone who wants to use language in an ethical and respectful way.
I’d like to leave you with one more thing to think about: “If a [marginalized person] doesn’t mind when another [marginalized person] says [slur], then I still think it should be okay for anyone to say [slur].”
Everybody, every single one among us, has probably complained about our mother at some point (sorry Mom). Probably at some point in your life you have turned to a sibling, a spouse, or a friend and really unloaded a whole venting session about your mother. Complaining about family members, even our most beloved and revered family members, is normal. If you spend that much time with someone you’re gonna have something to complain about eventually.
Now if someone outside the family started in on your mother in the same way as you did during your vent session, wouldn’t you be absolutely furious with them? Like if an acquaintance joined in and said, “Oh, yeah, your mom’s awful, for sure,” and started just going to town on her? That’s our mom. We can complain about her because she’s our mom and we love her. Other people cannot complain about our mom. We’ll kill you and no one will ever find where we hid the pieces of what used to be you.
Reading the above, maybe you shook your head and said, “No, I wouldn’t mind if someone insulted my beloved family member. It just wouldn’t bother me at all.” Okay, no problem. To each their own. But you can probably still acknowledge that this is a very normal thing for someone to be upset about, right?
Even though you personally might not mind if someone insulted your mother, you probably have the good sense not to insult someone else’s mother.
One day soon I’m going to make you a list of insults that are still okay to use, that don’t rely on the negative connotations about a type of person or group of people to be impactful. Till I can get you that list, please just call people you don’t like “fudge nuggets.” That is official advice from me, a language expert. You can cite this.
* Fixed a typo here.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.
Apology accepted.
Mom 🙂