The Linguistics of Name Calling

  Our topic this week is the linguistics of name-calling.  This episode is sort of the linguistic companion of our episode on Forbidden Words.  On that one, we talked to a philosopher about the semantics of slurs that are so offensive that decent people just shouldn’t use them.  On this episode,  we’re going to look more at words like ass-hole, that are offensive enough to pack a punch, but aren’t offensive enough to be always inappropriate.