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Words Gone Sour Stevroula Glezakos In her rich 2001 paper “Meaning and uselessness: how to think about derogatory words,” Jennifer Hornsby argues that it is not possible to give a semantic account of derogatory words – those that “…apply to people and are commonly understood to convey hatred and contempt” – within a theoretically sterilized space. For the meaning of a derogatory word, Hornsby tells us, “…there is nowhere else to look…than to uses of the word.” Since derogatory words are “useless, completely useless” for us, our meaning theory will remain incomplete: although the language contains derogatory words, “[d]erogatory words do not belong in any theories that use words to say what words mean – at least not as far as we, who find them useless, are concerned.” Hornsby assumes two clear divides: between derogatory words and their “neutral counterparts” (words that “apply to the same people but whose use does not convey these things”) and between “them” (speakers who employ the former) and “us” (who use only the latter). In this paper, I challenge this assumption, first, by pointing out that a word can be derogatory even when it does not (primarily) “convey hatred and contempt,” and second, by reflecting on an example in which a word wielded by one of “us” is far from neutral. I then go on to argue that the class of “words that apply to people” which Hornsby is most interested in – words of racial, ethnic, and gender classification – do not, in general, fall neatly into the categories “derogatory” or “neutral,” and I sketch a preliminary framework within which we might more accurately account for the meaning and use of such words.
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