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Yes. This happens with all slurs though.
When people say "N-word", they aren't yelling "You N-word!" at a black person. The signalling would make no sense (I want to yell a slur at you but I want to be Politically Correct about it...?) and they would sound stupid and unprincipled.
When they want to use the slur, they actually use the slur, so by not actually saying the slur, that's a strong signal that they are actually not using the slur. And this reifies the whole signal.
Is this stupid? shrug It's how slurs work.
That's my point. People who are racist just find a new word. Thinking that stopping the word will stop evil is silly.
We can all acknowledge that the euphemism treadmill is kind of dumb. Yet we still defend it because bad people use those words.
In the meantime, silly things like the OK symbol gets trolled into being something it's not... and people still go along with it.
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I’ve always seen it as stupid in the He-who-shall-not-named way. It’s poor communication (if you mean to refer to a slur, then imo it’s much better to simply say the word and be clear what was said and what was meant) but it also gives those words much more power than they’d otherwise have. Half the fun of smoking is knowing that it will really upset the squares, and likewise half the fun of saying retard or nigger is seeing the adults hyperventilating over a single word.
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I mean, the way things are going I could definitely see people in the future using "N-word" as a minced oath. It would certainly be amusing to see a kid try explaining to their teacher or angry parent that they called someone "an N-word, but not the N-word."
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