CONTENT WARNING: lots of uncensored slurs and offensive language, in a variety of languages.

.In part starting with my research with Christopher Hall on uses of the “n-word” (available here, and in (free) final draft form here), and in part because of the consulting work I do, I am an expert on slurs, epithets, and offensive language — the main language-y thing that companies, government organizations, journalists, lawmakers, lawyers, and judges are interested in is offensive language. Everyone wants to understand what they can and can’t, or should and shouldn’t say, and where the line is drawn, and for many people it has stark, real-world consequences. One of the things lots of people ask about is some variation of how do you know or how can I prove that something is offensive?

Ever since working on totes constructions with Lauren Spradlin, years ago, I’ve been thinking about hypochoristics (fancy linguist speak for ‘baby talk’ or ‘pet names’) and truncations, and how they relate to offensive language. A huge number of slurs are truncations of other words, and this isn’t really a coincidence.

Working with Lauren Spradlin on totes truncations we were focused on phonological and morphological rules of truncation: how does everyone know how to make new truncations, and what intuitive rules to people follow? Does anyone ever break those rules? What do these truncation patterns tell us about language more generally? There’s a lot to say there (and we’ve only, honestly, written about some of it — there’s another paper on the way, but here’s the conference talk), but one of the things that stood out to me immediately was that when we were talking about how you don’t yuzh (usually) eat blewbs (blueberries) with guac beeteedubs (BTW, by the way), is that certain words were shortenable but just sounded…offensive.

Truncating blueberry? Great. Truncating adjectives like ridiculous, or obnoxious? Totally fine. Truncating adjectives that relate to ethnic groups or places of origin? Really offensive. This is interesting: a morphological transformation that’s completely unremarkable in most contexts is deeply offensive in a small set of specific contexts.

The crazy thing is, this holds for novel truncations, meaning I can refer to someone with a truncation you’ve never heard before, and you’ll have an intuitive sense of whether it’s offensive. For instance, if someone said the chefs at the French restaurant I like are all mexies it reads, at least to me and everyone I’ve asked, as very offensive… even though I don’t know anyone who has ever heard that word before. (I wouldn’t be surprised if it exists, though). It’s clear I mean Mexican, which is in-and-of-itself fine, but it’s also clear that this particular phrasing is NOT OK.

And when you look at a list of offensive words (like, say, on Wikipedia), it really jumps out how many offensive terms follow this. An by no means exhaustive sample in no particular order:

Heeb and Heeby from Hebrew
Jap from Japan(ese)
Jerry from German
Hunky (and honkey(!)) from Hungarian
Paki from Pakistan(i)

Another way people intentionally offend is to take names stereotypically associated with a people, and call someone by that name, knowing it’s not their real name (for instance, Ike is an old fashioned epithet for Jewish men, Shaniqua is a name used to insult Black American women, Ahmed is used for Arab and muslim men, and the fact that this phenomenon exists goes a long way toward explaining the sentiment that being called “Karen” is a slur, even when the target is a person whose actual name is Karen but that’s unknown to the speaker). This truncation is also applied to names, making their use, in some cases, more offensive:

Ikey-mo from Ike and Moses (or Moishe)
Ack (or Akh) from Ahmed
Hymie from Hyman (itself an anglicization of Chayyim)
Abi from Abraham
Mo from Mohammed
Shaneeq(s) from Shaniqua

Interestingly, it’s not just totes style truncations, and shortening applied to offensive terms doesn’t make them less offensive, but rather more:

coon from barracoon
nig from…you know what it’s from
spic from either “hispanic” or “no spik ingles” (!)

I mentioned hypochoristics above, and I really think that’s the common factor. Baby-talk and “childish” language games can be fun and solidarity-building when they’re in-group behavior, but when baby talk is directed to someone who you don’t have the appropriate level of social closeness with, it’s insulting. It tells the speaker you respect them as much as you do a child. And to use baby talk for the name of the listener’s ethnic group, religion, or geographic origin, indicates belittling their background.

This seems to hold cross-linguistically as well, so in French, verlan (a game where you move syllables around similar to pig latin) is used to make offensive terms, like rebeu from beurre, itself a melioration of beurre from arabe (Arab), or feuj from juif (Jew(ish)). In Hebrew you get aravush, which has a “cutesy” diminutive marker -ush on the word arab. And the baby-talk element can be used to generate new offensive terms, so the more hateful parts of the internet use the term nig-nog to double down on offensiveness. While that particular term is attested as early as 1959, it and words like it were a starting point for the (thankfully now-defunct) subreddit /r/coontown.

Perhaps the wildest part about this, to me anyway, is that these truncations are used in fiction, sometimes even for groups of people that don’t exist. There’s an episode of Star Trek Voyager where a character claims that The Doctor was being totally Vulky and my first reaction was “the censors let that slide?!” Cardi is a slur for the fictional “race” of Cardassians in Star Trek (and it has its own entry in memory alpha). And in the gritty post-apocalyptic Canadian graphic novel “We Stand on Guard” the American aggressors routinely call the Canadians Nucks (from Canuck, a sometimes offensive, sometimes not slang term for Canadians). I remember reading it at a friend’s house and being genuinely shocked at a character referring to one of the protagonists as a "nuck bitch”. (He’s a mountie — itself a word probably originally intended disparagingly, from mounted police — and he left it as bedside reading as a sly provocation).

I've been watching so much DS9 lately that "Cardi B" sounds like a Cardassian rapper reclaiming the slur
— Cohen is a ghost (@skullmandible) February 4, 2019

There’s a LOT left to be said about slurs, epithets, and offensive language — after all, we haven’t even touched on using religious headgear or ethnic foods as terms of address, let alone sweary words combined with prosody (as in “shit gibbon”) — but it seems there’s something profoundly offensive about truncation and the diminutives it commonly is accompanied by. So a good rule of thumb is to avoid any truncations unless you either (1) are really sure your interlocutors won’t take it the wrong way, or (2) you’re actively trying to offend.

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