> No more absurd than the notion that a mere sequence of sounds could convey any other meaning or elicit any other response.
Disagree. The fact that voluntary communication works is somewhat miraculous, sure. But the idea that a reader could be made to experience something unpleasant against their will by mere words is far stranger. Obviously unpleasant meanings can be conveyed through words, but the idea that the words themselves can be inherently unpleasant feels like some kind of moral panic/social contagion (like if there was a satanic panic centered on the "brown note") rather than a real thing.
> I’m not sure why you think it’s the sound itself rather than the word/meaning.
If you're objecting to the very presence of the word then you're objecting to the word itself rather than the meaning being conveyed. There's a huge difference between e.g. describing a slur versus directing it at an individual, and just counting the number of times the slur is written obliterates that distinction.
When the problem is the induced experience, the literal glyphs or soundwaves that do this are relevant precisely because they are what currently induces the mental experiences; that the words and symbols are themselves arbitrarily mapped to the meanings they induce, does not change what they in fact currently do induce.
If I were to point to some misbehaving members of some group today and say they were "naughty", this would not induce the same experience as it would have in Shakespeare's time, where that word meant "worthless". One can object to the latter and not the former, precisely because which word pulls the metaphorical lever on which mental experience, changes between those situations.
The question "is moderating such language is a good idea or not?" is a separate one to this.
> One can object to the latter and not the former, precisely because which word pulls the metaphorical lever on which mental experience, changes between those situations.
One can - but not by just grepping for the character string and plotting a graph of the counts.
Indeed. As others in the replies have pointed out, the word "retard" in particular here is suffering from… I was going to say the Scunthorpe effect, but it's a different problem even though it is still automated.
Disagree. The fact that voluntary communication works is somewhat miraculous, sure. But the idea that a reader could be made to experience something unpleasant against their will by mere words is far stranger. Obviously unpleasant meanings can be conveyed through words, but the idea that the words themselves can be inherently unpleasant feels like some kind of moral panic/social contagion (like if there was a satanic panic centered on the "brown note") rather than a real thing.