- The team’s attorneys and linguistics experts argued that this demonstrated that the term had never really been disparaging—just a “robust informal synonym” for “American Indian,” which dictionaries only started to label as offensive in response to political pressure from a few Indian activists. But lexicographers are creatures of their age, and before the ‘60s members of the dominant culture were selective in their sensitivities. Merriam-Webster’s monumental Third International, published in 1961, warned its readers off “nigger,” “chink,” and “kike,” but it didn’t feel the need to indicate that some people might also take offense at “white trash,” “gook,” “wetback,” “pansy” and “fag.” Not that those words hadn’t been derogatory or demeaning all along. It’s just that lexicographers and most everyone else weren’t capable of imagining how those words would land on the people they targeted.
I haven't had time to go through the whole article yet, but it's pretty crazy how much we take linguistics and dictionaries for granted. Nobody really thinks about what gets put into a dictionary and why, who gets the say in putting things into the dictionary, what the contexts around the time period a word is placed are, and how that placement in the dictionary can have an impact on discussions to come.
This is part of why I hate the censorship of books in jr. high and high school. I think it's important to note, along with a myriad of other cultural factors, that certain words change perception. The banning of so many Mark Twain novels, I think, is the biggest loss. That word is not only important to the story, but important to the understanding of how we've changed as a culture, and how much change we still have to make. To whitewash slurs completely from classic literature not only whitewashes the past, but it also causes us to lose out on an important part of learning the development of language and society as a whole.