Tophat665

Sorry, no. People have a right to be offended by offensive speech, but and they may be able to exclude it from certain places as a matter of privacy, but they have no right to be protected from it. And let me pick that bone too: how can you be protected from speech? What damage can speech do you? Seriously, if one does not believe in onesself, I suppose, then speech which reinforces their peceived shortcomings might put them in a frame of mind as to damage themselves, but that's not a problem of speech, that's mental illness there.

But let us return to protection from offensive speech. Surely it is no mystery that any arbitrary word might be offensive to anyone. To a man with no feet, would anythig but the metric system be offensive? (Is black coffee offensive? Obviously to someone. That sounds like the kind of person to follow at a discrete distance until they leave a lousy tip so you can accurately call them a niggard and watch their feathers really ruffle for no reason.) Is it offensie to the woman who has had to have a radical mastecomy if somenone say that they "just have to get something off their chest" in their presence. I've been there, and I felt a little weird when that came out of my mouth, but just forged ahead because reasonable people do not take common turns of phrase like that personally even if they have a serious negative association with their literal meaning. (and because, having already stuck my little toe in my mouth, figured it would be a good idea not to keep going until I had the foot up to the knee.)

And I am not going to argue mankind/humankind. I have found that folks who are worried about that have already made up their minds. Whehr or not they have a good reason is not something I think it is important to fight about, but I do reserve the right to think they're being profundly superfical, reading as much into linguistic theory as the Victorians did into evolution, and more than a little silly.

So to recap: Your right to not be offended is not a right that trumps free expression in a public forum. Private is, of course, private. And if you want to not use man in the general rather than the gendered sense, that's your right, but I find it a little offensive.

Be Well, oh Famously Strange one.

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